


Dissonance

by wolf_shadoe



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 11:00:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27849806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolf_shadoe/pseuds/wolf_shadoe
Summary: S6, just before As You Were; an angsty ramble (with a brighter-than-canon ending).
Relationships: Spike/Buffy Summers
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	1. Chapter 1

She needs to end this.  


The thought passes through a million times a day, night. Sometimes it's an urgent yelp, a squeak of alarm. More often it's something that slithers, silent and insidious, a whisper that's never quite loud enough to distinguish from the rustling of the breeze and thus is both easy to ignore and impossible to not be aware of.

_ End it - end it - end it. _

Before…  


(She never finishes that sentence. There might be nothing left to fight for, but that doesn't mean she's giving in.)

He's waiting again tonight, after work, after she sent him away from the backlot of Doublemeat with his belt loops torn and her arousal still wet on his fingers. Her breaks aren't near long enough to satisfy. She doesn't think he  _ can _ be satisfied. Not like that. And so here he lurks, just outside the pool of light cast by her front door, pacing, smoking, waiting. A beast come prowling to lure her away from the threshold of safety. A hopeful stray edging closer to the warmth of that lit door.

She  _ can't _ let him in. This he ever refuses to understand, but  _ won't  _ is a simpler concept; tonight he angles once for entry, hears her weakly exasperated  _ no _ as the opening of negotiations that it maybe kind of is, and then for the second night running, she puts her back to the bark of the nearest tree in compromise and fucks him once more before bedtime. There's no alarms in yelps or squeaks or silent whispers of unease while she does so. Just panting breath, and half-suppressed grunts, and illicit, outlawed words tumbling from his tongue to her skin. Her name sounds too… too precious, too powerful, too  _ something _ when it's formed by his lips in ragged murmurs. An evocation, a heretical blessing, something that reaches down inside of her and tugs at locks it shouldn't. She clenches her muscles tight around him in admonishment, in punishment, in need and satisfaction and rebellion, and his breath catches sharply for a second before the illegal litany redoubles. She never can shut him up. Try though she mightn't. She bites down on the shoulder of his coat in response, in anger, in an effort to silence her own tongue behind gritted teeth. Smoky, supple leather caresses her cheek while the hard flesh and bone beneath rightly refuse to yield to the pressure of her flat-edged teeth. Only when they're done fucking does she release him, muscles in her jaw beginning to stiffen from the force of her grip. There's an imprint of her teeth in the leather, and she laves it with her tongue once fondly before she pulls away.

"Now  _ get _ ," she orders. Scram.  _ You know that's all you're getting and more than I should give _ .  


Still buckling his belt, he shoots her a sidelong glare that's prickly enough to tempt her to respond. But she's tired (she's always tired, but it feels a justifiable excuse when midnight's come and gone and she's worked a double shift before patrol).

So, "It's late," she adds wearily. Too late to keep running these circular arguments with herself and him, too exhausting, all of it, pointless and stalemated and she - needs - to - end - this.  


He softens instantly, shrinks from his posturing to a look of apologetic submission that draws back her scowl. If he would only treat this as the dispassionately physical affair it ought to be then perhaps she could let it continue. If she then wanted it to.  


"Yeah," he agrees gently. "Go on and get your beauty sleep, luv. I'll run another lap, take care of any trouble."

She hates this the most. When he grovels for scraps. Tries too hard to invent a niche for himself. Forces her to question whether she knew he'd offer, knew she could skimp on her own patrol to get home sooner and do this; whether she's letting herself rely on him, just a little, just a lot, just enough to get through each day. Their transactions may be highly weighted in her favour, but somehow that only makes her feel filthier; he doesn't see them that way. She hates it when he's  _ kind. _

She's still tired and it's not getting any less late. She dips her chin in a hint of a nod as she turns away, then walks inside without looking back. He'll still be there tomorrow. And the night after that.  _ She  _ needs to put an end to it.

  
  


She's given someone the wrong order. Maybe. The man standing at the counter seems to think so, if she’s understanding him correctly, which is debatable given that he's shouting too vehemently to make much sense. Something about the number of beef-chicken-monstrosity patties in his burger and is she some kind of wacko greeny to short him? She considers informing him that the patties are formulated from a wacko tree-hugger vegetable base anyway, but decides against it. She needs this job. She can't remember what the man ordered, but it doesn't matter. There's a protocol. Everything has a protocol. She presses buttons, counts out coins, sets his refund down on the counter. He gives her a final furious burst of words that all sound like so much  _ blah, _ picks up the coins, and spits on the counter and the front of her shirt before storming out. She sighs and picks up the disinfectant spray, and wonders again if she’s really coming here for exactly this.  


Spike’s waiting, of course, as soon as she steps outside for her final break of the night. Waiting - and bouncing with a tense, still-cooling energy that immediately hikes her suspicions.

"How long have you been here?" she asks flatly.

"Long enough." Frustration flickers across his face, and she can feel a familiar argument needling at the air. One stalemated, like all the others. For now. He lets it lie; juts his chin at her and offers instead, "I was kind. He'll get a few miles before he has to call for a tow truck for all those flat tyres."  


Sigh. It  _ was  _ kind, in a sense, which was the worst of it. He could have cut a brake line. Steering cable. Whatever parts cars had that meant a mischievous-minded and vendetta-ready vampire could swiftly turn them into death traps. She'd probably never have known. Except her knowing was the whole point of his reacting at all. It's all another move in this manipulation game that gets them nowhere but frustrated at their locked horns.  


She shrugs, sits down, displaying the exact amount of fucks she gives for this petty crime he wishes to gift her. She won't leave this job. She doesn't care if customers get away with spitting on her hideous uniform or not. She can't manage to leave him _-_ to reject him, rather, because they're not _in_ an anything for her to leave - so what does the rest matter? On any scale of degrading behaviours, fucking a soulless vampire surely sits at the top.  


The mood darkens, any hope of lightness draining from this space between the dumpster and delivery door. Or, her mood does. Spike’s expression has taken on that 'minor stumbling block' look that usually precedes some quick non sequitur into a new form of attack. Or whatever these attempts to rankle or rally her categorise as.  


"I can't keep doing this," she says first, matter-of-fact.  


"Then quit." His voice is blunt and the words easy and, she thinks, honest to an unusual degree. Only, she's not certain which 'this' they're intended for. Both, perhaps. Quit the job, quit the… dalliance, move to Honolulu and let him forget her and this whole mess. They’re both sick and tired of it. By it. For it.  


He can't mean it.  


She stares at him in silence for a long moment, at the contrast and contradiction of him, at the frustration and gritty stubbornness evident in the set of his shoulders, echoing her own.  


"Kiss me," he challenges quietly, with a defiant cock of one eyebrow.  


It finally ticks her off, so she does. Just to shut him up.  


His hands are rough tonight, hard with her, bolshy like the two of them are squaring off to really throw down. Perhaps they should. Perhaps a lot of things, lately.  


Fighting, though; worthy of consideration. There's only so much to do in this shared cage, after all. Fuck, fight. There might be doors labelled  _ flee _ and  _ feed _ \- his teeth, her stake; take a gamble - but the only door she's taking tonight is the one just behind her that's on a nine-minute countdown to call her back to the counter. The timers on those other doors… who knows. Not her. Perhaps they've already run down; she certainly seems unable to flee, despite every decision she's made to do so. Perhaps, perhaps.  


"Shut up and fuck me," she snarls, though he hasn't said anything. Yet. She craves silence, and not-thinking, and sensations that fill up her awareness. She needs those moments where it doesn't matter that they're only together in this trap.  


Spike obliges. Brusque hands spin her to face the nearest wall, and she braces her forearms on its abrasive surface before dropping her forehead to press against it too. He jerks down her ugly uniform pants, curt and careless as desired. If there's a momentary pause at her lack of underwear, a single soft, reverential stroke of fingertips from her naked bum down to her thigh, she refuses to notice. Then he's yanking open his jeans behind her, the jangle of his belt buckle flashing memory through her mind's eye of being whipped with it the last time they got like this, down in the basement of the crypt where she could let herself shout. The image adds to her arousal, and disgust, and arousal, but they don't play those games on the back doorsteps of fast food establishments. Not so far.  


And not tonight. One of his hands pins hers to the wall at the wrists, gratingly hard,  _ deliciously  _ hard, but his coat falls carefully around her as he covers her from behind. Soft leather sliding on the sides of her shins, a pool of black shadow enveloping her, making her his, for a little while, for nine minutes (a safe measure of time, really), lining the walls of their shared space and freeing her inside them.  


The silence doesn't last, of course, once the thrusting starts and the not-thinking-but-feeling takes over. Cool breath lands on the nape of her neck, a night breeze of obscenities in whispers, and they're tripping off her tongue too, none of it mattering, these things said here and now. None of it existing, those things beyond the here and now.  


Afterwards he melts against her, a comfortable weight on her back, that on her legs lessened by the supporting arm wrapped around her waist. Her whole body tingles pleasurably, temporarily sated, temporarily cast off and away from its frustrations and pains.  


He presses his lips to the back of her head, bestowing a tender kiss to her grease-scented hair, and her eyes prickle warningly at the feeling it evokes. Because she doesn't  _ want _ to end this. Can't. She drops her head lower, hiding deeper in their shadows, deeper in this pocket inside the filth, this space where there's something too right to be wrong and too beautiful to be denied. The truth of it all is inescapable, naked like this, and it burns her even as she revels in it.  


Eventually it becomes too much, and she nudges him off, sniffing back the prickles. She dresses quickly, eyes on the back alley exit, on his coat, jeans, boots; anywhere but on herself and the question that always rises now. What  _ is _ she, to do these things? It's a thought that sends her skittering inside, disturbed to the core of every molecule it reaches before she can stomp it out. A queasy-making awareness of the great big fat unknown where so much of her self image lies. She is  _ wrong,  _ she knows, but right is indecipherable. Trapped, is what she is. Trapped between two incompatible truths.  


"Only two more hours, yeah?" he encourages, as though she counts them down, as though she cares, as though time doesn't run by different rules inside the staff areas of the Doublemeat Palace.  


"Yep," she monotones. God, listen to her, already back in zombie-mode the moment she finished rebuttoning her uniform. Hopefully the thing's not cursed. Or should that be hopefully it  _ is _ cursed? A cursed uniform would be a nice simple problem to have.  


They stare at each other in loud silence for a beat, then she gives him a wonky half-smile and heads back inside. Countdown timers or no, she can feel this running out on them. Some critical battle approaching where it all goes on the line and everything shatters apart. He's aware of it too; has scented it lurking with that eerie nose of his or something. It's in their growing desperation; in the way they squeeze each other's flesh as if to cleave parts of it to themselves. It's in the storms building in their glares, and fills the silences where it goes unmentioned. This stalemate cannot continue forever. She needs to put an end to it, before they find out where the breaking point is. Before the universe does it for them.

  
  


Burning his way through half a pack of smokes, Spike watches, and muses. There's a hedge walling off one side of the Doublemeat drive-through; behind it, a patch of scrubby trees before the second hedge closes them in. It's a good place to sit, unseen and all-seeing. Not that the view's particularly exciting. Across the drive-through lane and through the window, Buffy stands beside the cash register - nay, slouches beside the cash register - drawing patterns in invisible dust on the counter. She hasn't looked up once in… twenty-four minutes. Her expression is neutral, blank, detached. And just a little bit sad. The fluorescent lighting tries to cast her skin pallid against the bold primaries of uniform and decor, but the warm tones of her refuse to fully submit, glowing softly golden and as out of place as a jackal in a ring of dyed poodles. It's more depressing than it is inspiring. Poodles too were wild and free once.

Things are changing, lately.  _ She's  _ changing. The combatative animosity that characterised the first weeks of this new form of relationship eventually simmered down, became a familiar trading of blows and barbs, but the tension which is steadily rising in its place is a whole different beast. One formed of shadow and shades, formless, sure to vanish if it can only be dragged out into the light. But catching firm hold of a thing without substance makes the dragging part a mite difficult. So he's watching. Tonight, last night, tomorrow, however many more morrows it takes. Observing, gathering intel, scrutinising every angle available to try to pick out just what's gone wrong, going wrong, going to go wrong, or right. What it is that he's missing, missed, in all his study of her.  


(Sometimes, lately, in the depth of silence and solitude, he fears that he already knows exactly what it is he's missing. But that one can't be helped, so there simply has to be something else.)

They’re so good together. Beyond his wildest dreams, to run the cliché. She knows it. Doesn’t even bother trying to deny it anymore. And she has to see that they could be even better. That he could, for her. But it feels like the closer they get to where her objections should start to crumble, the stronger those objections become. Like they're something outside of her, a mathematical law of the universe, and insurmountable. Which is sodding stupid, because supposed laws of the universe are bent and broken all the damn time around here. The permanence of death, for example. He just needs to put a finger on precisely what this one is, then it can be fought.  


Because she's not fighting it. Not anymore. She fought him, and she fought this, this that they have now, but when she meets the boundary she's put around their relationship, she submits to it every time. Even if she doesn't want to. Even if it saddens her, at times. She reacts violently, of course, to any attempt to discuss the topic of this and them. Conflict lashes from her, venom on her tongue and force in her fists, and if he keeps pushing, she'll only flee. For the sake of keeping what he has, he always drops it. But he catches her out, at other times, when he's kept his disobedient tongue in line and something's going well; catches the way she'll touch him fondly, and hold him to her fiercely for a brief, intense second; catches the way conflict rages deep down in her eyes while she does, pained and despairing. Catches the way her expression turns to sadness with increasing frequency when they're together, to mournfulness; the occasional hint of salt on the air as she aches for something she could bloody well have if she'd only accept it.

_ Why won't you let yourself love me? _ Most frequently, he falls back on blaming Angel. It's far too easy to do. But that gets him nowhere except indignantly frustrated, so shove it aside for tonight. There's something else going on, in that look in her eyes, and somehow he's going to reach in there and grasp it, crush it, light it up and watch it dissolve. Soon. Asap. Because this tension that's rising around them is beginning to feel like a chute, a funnel, a whirlpool, walls closing in to race them towards… he doesn't know. And often wishes it would bloody well hurry up about it; better to face whatever it is head-on and get it over with than continue this interminable wait. But then he remembers the way she clings to him for those split-seconds, and the mourning in her eyes, and he fears that when the dust settles it won't be on the pair of them, freed of her false convictions and objections, but on her standing alone once more.  


He can't let her go. Not now that he knows what it is to be with her. To lap at her naked skin and hear her laughter between the sheets. To watch her writhe beneath the starlight and sink her fingertips into his flesh in needy possession. Not now that he knows what it is to lose her. To exist in a world without her in it. There's cold steel in the pit of his stomach, a determination to be torn apart before anything ever gets to her again.  


A car pulls up in the Doublemeat lot, and Buffy slowly looks up from her fog. Her chest moves in an inkling of a sigh, then she straightens up and slaps that bot-like smile on her face. He lights another smoke, and wonders whether she'd let the real bot come to work for her if it were somehow to be repaired, or if she considers this misery too jealously her own special due. 

  
  


Watching's given him nothing but impatience, irritation and a certain naggy weariness that he's either absorbed via Buffy or through spending too much time in the aura of Doublemeat himself. He needs to get away, and were it not her night off, he'd take this urge to escape and head up the coast for a night of nothing but open roads and the sound of an engine. But it is her night off, so he waits by her curb to invite her to.

"Go where?" she asks, frowning. Dubious, suspicious, perplexed; these are the most encouraging set of responses she has to his attempts at kind gestures.  


"Up the coast. Down the coast. Inland through the hills. West into the great Pacific. Take your pick." He holds his palms open to her, empty of weapon or deceit.  


It's not enough; her frown's darkening towards a decision.  


"Anywhere that's not here," he adds, sighing. Gazes down her street to those distant hills, feels the pressure of the bike at his back that can spirit them there. Knows it'll be taking him nowhere unless she condescends to cross the eight feet of path and join him.  _ Let me carry you away from all this. Let's pretend, yeah, just for a night, that it's just you and me? _ That'd go down like a bucket of bricks. "There's that demon bar up in Thurlton what could probably do with a reminder of your presence."  


She bites her lip, gaze slowly drawn to contemplation of the same hills. She wants to go, and not for the bar. "How long?" she asks, still sounding dubious.  


"Thirty minutes, each way," he offers. "Plus however long you feel like pounding heads." Or pounding him. The bar's generally harmless, a tiny watering hole for the more benign types visiting the hellmouth region. Doesn't even serve blood.  


She's silent so long that he begins to suspect she's forgotten him entirely, forgotten herself, got lost in one of those illogical mazes inside her head. Then, "Okay," she murmurs, and crosses over to the bike.

"Okay," he echoes, trying and failing to smother his grin.

  
  


Perched behind him, she watches the country fly by like the predator she is, all coiled muscles and sharp eyes, ready to leap, tackle, stab, like some horse-borne warrior closing in on her prey. The speed of the bike thrills her, though she'll never admit to it; her pleasure is broadcast only in the eager flexing of her fingers and thighs every time he shifts the accelerator. The closeness of her thrills him.  


Too soon, or maybe just soon enough, the bar's appearing before them and he's pulling to a stop. Sunnydale's far behind, everything's far behind, and she must be feeling it too as she jumps off the bike and flashes him a smile. Sometimes, it's all so damn perfect.  


Inside, she ignores the other patrons and orders a coke. A nervous ripple goes through the place; they know who she is and what he is, and no one wants trouble. She takes a booth towards the back, and although a few demon-types slip out surreptitiously over the next ten minutes, the rest gradually settle back into their seats, if not quite as comfortably as before. He mimics her order, deciding not to hand her an argument about drinking and driving. Grabs a menu off the counter and tosses it onto the table as he takes the seat opposite her.  


"Had dinner?"

Her eyes flash a warning ( _ this isn't a date, you're not buying me dinner, yada yada) _ , but she reaches for the menu. "What do they even serve here?"

He shrugs. "Veggie stuff, mostly. Lots of chilli. Bean burgers and such. Owner's a jil'krekton."  


If she fails to recognise the species, she doesn't let on. After reading the second side, she sets the menu down again and picks up her drink.  


"Chip tray's good," he comments, flicking the page back over. "You can help me make a dent in it." He springs up and goes back to the bar to order one before she can object. Occasionally, when the mood's right, the scoobies far away, and the only possible observers are solidly from his side of the tracks, she'll level with him casually as a friend. Or, an ally, he supposes, from her point of view. Anyway. She'll eat, if he orders something.  


"You sure the food here's people-safe?" she asks when he returns, indicating with a flick of her eyes the floppy-horned and three-armed man behind the bar.

"Eat here all the time," he tells her. Well, once or twice, but the food was good, and jil'krektons are sensitive beasts.  


"You're not a people," she says, and it's not the eye-rolling automatic response she'd once have used it as but the tighter, more desperately stubborn type of statement she's been flinging at him with increasing frequency lately.

It's also flavoured with that new tension that's been building around them, so he decides to dig deeper into it. "Why not?" he asks, watching her face intently.  


Now she does roll her eyes, averting them in the process. It's nought but a weak attempt to dodge back to familiar ground. "Vampires aren't people."

He softens his voice further, towards gentle curiosity and away from old arguments, "Why not?"  


A scowl skims across her face. "They don't have souls."

_ They _ , not  _ you. _ It's the same old answer, but there's some distance to the subject, at least. "So?" he challenges. "Don't need a soul to think, to feel, to converse with whatever you think counts as people. To make decisions. To love." He mumbles the last point, refusing to leave it out, yet hoping to avoid this conversation taking a well-trodden turn for the worse.

"It's not the same," she mutters. Draws in a breath and her arguments with it. "Look, you  _ can't  _ understand it without one. Okay, so you can have a conversation and- and enjoy chips and stuff. That doesn't make you a person. There's parrots that can do all that. Only a soul can make someone a real person."

"Sleep with parrots often, do you?" he asks, and yes, it's snarky, but he's so bloody sick of this shyte and not getting any closer to understanding her logic.

Her face closes off, and her eyes go to the door and stay there furiously as she computes the fact that storming off isn't an easy solution all the way out here. He watches her, feeling calm again after that slight slip of his chain, and intuiting suddenly that there is indeed something here he needs to uncover. And beneath the covering fury of her, in the whites of her eyes as they dart to check each of the bar's exits, he finds it. Fear. She's not angry that he keeps challenging her notions of personhood. She's afraid that he's right. Deeply afraid, now that he focuses on it.  _ Why? _   


He drops his gaze to his glass, toying with the pattern of condensation drips it's leaving on the table, backing off from the potential fight with a cornered and frightened slayer.  _ Why? _ She's right about one thing; he doesn't understand. But he's got another puzzle piece now, so while she cools back down he turns it over and looks for the parts it might connect.  


If she accepts that he's a person, soulless and all… well, would put her actions towards him in a different light, wouldn't it? She's always seen a bit of a difference between hitting a vampire for being in one's way, and harming a person for same. Between using one for sex, and people being used. But if that's what she's so afraid of - if that's behind the way she teeters, conflicted, those moments when she desperately  _ wants _ something more with him - then that's sodding stupid of her; he's always been a willing participant. Or, mostly. And there are enough red marks beside his name in their shared history to balance the rest.  


He's jolted from vague thoughts of just how to go about putting the,  _ we're both people and that's a-okay so let's date properly?  _ argument to her when the chips arrive. They’re spread out on a huge tray, piled over with beans and gravy and guac and tiny whole chillies, a jarring mashup of British pub food and Mexican street tucker. Oddly, perhaps, it works.  


Buffy smiles a vague thanks at the three-armed barman, then pokes cautiously at a chip once he's gone. Her stomach rumbles.

He picks up a chip, dips it in something, and swallows it two bites before waving at the plate. "Go on. I can't eat this much alone."

There's no anger left in her eyes when they turn to him briefly. Just a hint of worn-out sadness. She picks up a chip and starts eating. The girl trusts him not to poison her. It's something.  


"Wasn’t always a vampire," he points out a bit later, scratching around for a safe edge of the topic. "Do remember what it was like. Having a soul and all."

Her thoughtful face comes out. "Do you?" she asks, and it sounds rhetorical. Or a rebuttal.  


Does he? He thought so when he laid claim to it a moment ago. Bah, forget the question. Irrelevant whether his memory's been altered by the years or not. He picks up another chilli, while Buffy narrows her eyes at one in thought.

Soberly, she asks the tabletop, "Do vampires wake up with an entire set of memories of their body's prior beliefs and behaviour that are the complete opposite to everything they believe about themselves and the way they should be?" She pauses, picks up her coke, waves it as she continues in a jesting tone, "Is that why they're always so eager to prove themselves properly evil?"  


He snorts softly, acknowledging the switch to humour she needed. Then shrugs. "Yes and no… Alright, say for whatever reason, you look back on something you did the week before you died. Summat all polite and proper. Can see it made sense at the time, when you were only human and thought you had to fit yourself into society's norms.  _ Now,  _ though, now you're a hell of a lot more than merely human. Don't need to fit in. Don't need to play their games. Especially when there's new ones that suddenly seem very appealing. Becoming a vampire changes your priorities. And, far as I can figure it, losing your soul mostly means losing your fear. It's only fear that keeps your  _ people  _ on the straight and narrow. Fear of punishment. Fear of judgement. Fear of being cast out."  


She shakes her head, brushing his words off easily. "It's really not, Spike." She looks like she's going to say more, then sighs to herself and sips her drink instead. He gets it. She's walling him out again, placing the behavioural motivations of the bleeding soul-havers as something beyond his possible grasp or understanding. Maybe they are. She herself's a tangled fucking mystery to him at times, christ knows.  


They pick at chips for a while in an increasingly desultory fashion, the conversation brick-walled but neither ready to concede and move on.

"It doesn’t matter anyway," she says finally, wearily. "What they did the week before. It wasn't actually them that did it, so there's no conflict to resolve."

He's heard this too from her before, in passing, and no, she's not going to like his response to it now. But he's going to argue the point all the same. It feels crucial, right now, to dig his heels in over exactly who and what he is. She's bloody well hiding enough about their relationship; she can fucking well face up to the basic facts about it in the privacy of her own brain. God, he's tired of all this, tired and tense and volatile for it. There's a special type of frustration in watching someone struggle to swim while slapping away your offered hand, and it's been wearing him down to naked nerve endings for months. Should have taken her back to the crypt and shot for thoughtless ecstasy under the covers instead of this hopeless attempt at escaping what they've only gone and brought out here with them. Maybe he still can. She's about to get angry enough for something to blow, when he picks up this argument. "Sure some of them would like to claim so." Himself, for starters. "But that's a load of bollocks. Vampires are still the same-" he huffs to himself in dark amusement, " _ person  _ they were before they died. Might gain a new set of tastes and lose the brakes, but your watchers are lying to you with that rot."

"No, they're not," she says, in a low voice that drips danger. "The  _ person  _ dies. The demon sets up shop in their body. They might steal that person's memories, but they are  _ not  _ people." The words are deeply carved, a commandment she's recited until it's scar tissue on her heart. "Let's go." She stands up, brushing off her clothing coldly.

He swallows and follows her silently, thoughts scattered into an uneasy jumble of static.

  
  


Flying down the highway again, she suddenly tightens the grip of her thighs on his and the bike, lets go of his waist, and leans straight back into the precariously open air.  


He grabs her by the front of her shirt with one hand and skids the bike to an abrupt halt. Had his heart been beating, he's fairly certain it would just have stopped.  


It takes him a few missing beats to be fully convinced that they're stationary, then he cuts the engine, drops his handful of her shirt like it's scalding him, and storms off from the bike. On the side of the road, facing the desert, he clenches his fingers tight in his hair and  _ screams _ . The sound encompasses a lot more than the last thirty seconds. Crickets shut up at it, leaving a deeper silence in its wake.

Shrubs, trees, prickly things stretch out into the distance before him. He imagines running out there, just running, like he earlier imagined driving. But she's in the opposite direction, and in the hollow echo of that scream he needs to crush her to him until both of their ribs crack.

She's sitting quietly on the side of the bike when he comes back, her head slightly bowed. He touches her shoulder first, tentative, shaken and shaky. He should be mad, but that's not what this sensation is. She rises at his touch, leans into his chest and slides her arms around his waist, and he squeezes her bruisingly tight until the worst of it fades away.

"I wasn't going to fall off," she whispers. "But." She sighs softly. "I'm sorry, Spike."

He nods, and strokes her (living, breathing, perfectly unharmed) back once more before letting her go. It's true; she'd never have fallen. His eyes fall to checking the bike's controls, avoiding her face. "Warn a bloke next time you decide to play gymnast, yeah?" he mutters.  


"Promise," she says, her voice serious and still sorry.

He sighs and gets back on the bike, and she presses herself onto his back like a limpet, one cheek nestled down between his shoulder blades and her arms tight around him.  


He takes it slower, at first for his jangled nerves, then because why rush back to Sunnyhell anyway? Limpet-Buffy's slowly moulded herself more comfortably against him, one of her thumbs idly stroking his stomach, more snuggly than she ever lets herself be outside of this narrow circumstance. The engine purrs beneath them, the night air tastes clean and crisp, and comfort sinks down into his bones at last. There's something that happens, something that rubs into him when he's with her like this. It's starting to make him nervous, what with all the reminders of his inadequacy she's been doing lately, but he knows that in all his years of unlife, he hasn't ever felt so  _ complete _ as her presence makes him.

The lights of Sunnydale are edging nearer ahead of them when she lifts her mouth to his ear to say gently, "I believe I've frightened you, Mr fearless vampire."  


"You're the slayer. It's your job to," he says wryly. A few breaths pass, then he slows them further to say quietly, "You terrify me, luv. In every manner that there is."  


"What happened to being fearless?" The question's more wistful than anything.  


He scoffs instead of answering. God he talks some shit, as if he knows anything about it. The only thing that makes sense right now is her soft weight against him. The vast world surrounding them's a mystery too big and much too confusing. He lifts one of her hands to his face to press a kiss to it, and she snuggles back down. 

  
  


When she gives no orders to the contrary, he takes them back to the vicinity of his crypt to put the bike away. Her hands adjust the branches that help camouflage the broken-down mausoleum he stashes it in, moving a leaf here and there with that look of thoughtful sadness back on her face. He should have whipped past Sunnydale altogether, taken her blasting down the winding coastal road and told her to bloody swing off the back like an acrobat if it would make her happy. But he's haunted enough by nightmares of her falling. And they'd still have ended up right back here.

She tinkers with the arrangement of leaves long enough to have woven them into a wreath, then turns to him with slow reluctance. He waits, the earlier sense of contentment turned sober and cold but still lingering faintly. Sometimes he thinks he could still kill her, just to swallow that feeling down inside.  


"I have to patrol," she says, so he nods and drops in beside her.

It's a peaceful night, for Sunnydale. A sliver of moon hangs in a cloudless sky, and the first three cemeteries are empty of the undead. The whole night begins to feel like the death of something, emptied for their reflection. In the fourth cemetery she stakes a stray fledgeling, quipless and efficient as the idiot panics enough to bolt straight into her weapon.  


"Is that the attraction?" she asks afterwards, staring down at the dust-coated grass with an inscrutable look on her face. "The fear that slayers represent?"  


"No," he says simply. Can't define his love for her in words in his own head, so he'll never be able to describe it to her. "That'd be a reason to stay the hell away."

"So why don't you? Why hunt us down?"  


The  _ dis- _ comfort she also evokes so easily churns about within him again. What was once solid ground has become loosely shifting gravel under his feet somewhere over the past few years. "Guess I'm just a misfit," he says in lieu of explanation.  


"Mmm," she murmurs, non-committal and to herself, and they finish the route in silence before she leads the way back to his crypt.

She's softer, tonight. Easily coercible into the silky sheets he keeps on the bed for her, unusually generous with her kisses. It gives him a sinking premonition that she's going to end the evening by breaking up with him, again, but he bottles it down to make love to her in the interim. She's intoxicating. Painful in her perfection. He longs to sob into the pillow of her breasts, and can't tell whether he'd be crying with elation or despair.  


When she lies liquid on top of him afterwards and heaves a gut-deep sigh of regret, he  _ knows _ she's about to try to break up with him again. Her fingers clench once, a needy grasp at him that belies whatever she's planning to say, then she's pushing herself off and up and searching for her clothes. He doesn't bother moving. If she wants to flay him there's no point in getting dressed up for it.

She sits down on the end of the bed to zip up her boots, and it's only once that's done, once everything is strapped down and folded away, emotions jailed behind an ice-cold mask, that she says it. "I can't do this anymore. It has to end."

"Shush," he tells her quietly, watching the ceiling. "Don't say it." Say nothing, and there'll be nothing to retract. She'll be back. She always comes back.  


"I have to."

"Just go, if you're going." The next bit tastes like ground glass, but it falls softly from his tongue all the same. "There's nothing  _ to _ end."  


"There is," she says in a tiny voice, and the new admission makes him lift his head to stare at her. He's been chasing it so long, imagining the way it would mark a great step forward, the way she'd soon come to realise that avowing their relationship has not, in fact, brought the sky crumbling down on their heads but has only made everything easier. She was supposed to find it  _ relieving.  
_

That's not what's happening here. She studies the floor between her feet, shoulders hunched, cringing in docile surrender to the pain of it. He ought to be offended, ought to shoot back that it's not the end of the bloody world to maybe have accepted having some kind of less-than-murderous feelings towards him, but… she's not trying to hurt him. She's just hurting, and he'd give anything, everything, to avoid that.  


"Spike… this is destroying me." The scent of tears cuts through the salt-musk of their lovemaking, then she sniffs, standing up and swiping at her eyes, keeping her back to him.

He's bewildered. Chest aching with the urge to comfort her, tongue at an utter loss for how to. Months they've been on this roundabout now, and the closer he gets the less he understands. "Why?" he asks, and it sounds so lost.

She sighs again, a wobble through it. Then turns those sad, conflicted eyes on him for a long moment, weighing something up behind them. "How many of your kind do you reckon I've killed?" she quotes in a seductive, malice-laced ribbon of silk. "A thousand, a thousand thousand? Friends. Classmates. Strangers. Whores." Her lip curls up in a sneer that doesn't match her eyes. "How can you ask me to-" vehemence serrates the words before they're cut off in a gulp. She presses her lips together, swallows. "I  _ can't  _ love you," she whispers. Then shakes her head and scurries out.

Echoes slide like spilt oil around the cavern he calls home, that shadow he's been reaching blindly for now bleeding forth, and he lies back to let it smother him.  _ How many of your kind…  
_

Fuck.

  
  


For three nights running, Spike’s obvious only by his absence. She spends her work breaks leaning against the dumpster with her arms folded over herself, and wonders if she should take up smoking to pass the time. She patrols with a dull sense of necessity, wondering when a hundred thousand to nil might become a hundred thousand to one. Or is she already down two points? Glance at the sky and wonder if the Powers that Be are keeping count and placing bets while they screw with her life. Wonder when the game ends. Wonder anything except where Spike is and why he seems to  _ finally _ have taken her words to heart. Anything except whether she ever really wanted him to.

Tomorrow, she decides, she'll go over to the crypt. Not because she's worried (she isn't, that would be ridiculous). Just to make sure he's not up to some nefarious scheme over there. She could go now, but it's one a.m. and Dawn’s asleep and Willow’s staying over at Xander's after a wedding planning thing, and besides, she's not really worried. His schemes never go anywhere anyway.  


At three a.m, a pebble plinks off her window. Then a second one, while she's still trying to decide if she really heard the first. She kicks off the covers and stomps out of bed before a third stone can come careening through the glass.  


Her eyes are on the tree as she throws the window open, but it's empty, tripping up the angry words on her tongue before she spots him standing on the path below. " _ What?"  _ she hisses.  


"Need to talk," he says, volume down but the words firm. "Come out."  


"No," she says instantly, wrinkling up her nose. Preposterous.  


He makes a frustrated sound that's part sigh and part growl. His hair's a mess, now that she's had time to take it in, and he's fidgeting constantly, all a snappy, lit-fuse restlessness that can only bode ill. She crosses her arms stubbornly and waits.

He spits a curse at the nearest bushes, and she can see the accompanying glare he gives them from here. Another growl-sigh, then he turns to face her window solidly and squares his shoulders, determined and defiant. Oh hell, he'd better keep his voice down, whatever he's come to get off his chest- oh god, he'd better not be about to tell the whole neighbourhood that they've been sleeping together. Heat drains from her cheeks at the thought.  


"What if you're not the one who came back wrong?" he proclaims, a little too loud, a little too forced, jaw thrust out as if he doesn't want to admit this but is charging ahead anyway.  


_ Huh? _   


She doesn't need to ask for him to expand upon it; charging ahead was an apt description, because he's on a roll now. "You want to know how I could fall in love with you? How I can ask you to take me out of this fucking speciesist box and treat me like more than a monster?" His voice drops for a moment as he looks down to mutter, "Like you used to." Then his eyes are back on her, piercing in their stormy turbulence. " _ I _ came back wrong, Buffy," he growls. "Never was the evil creature Dru hoped for - though god knows I bloody tried - let her down from the bloody get-go, I did. Felt too much, cared too much, too much fucking humanity left in me. Her sodding fault, gotta be. She's not bloody right either."  


Buffy raises her eyebrows, nods in weakly mocking agreement with that last bit, because, what the fuck?

"Wasn’t ever enough of a sodding monster even before they put this damn thing in my head. No hope of becoming one now. But you won't bleeding accept me as anything else long as you can throw my gaping insufficiency in my face - yeah, don't tell me, I fucking get it now." He points a finger at her, vaguely threatening. "Got your number, I do,  _ slayer _ . Killer of monsters that go bump in the night.  _ Protector _ of the  _ people. _ " He huffs a laugh that's the opposite of amused. "You're right, too," he tosses at her, suddenly friendly. "They're not bloody people, ninety-nine point nine-nine-nine per cent of 'em. All bloodlust and hate and nothing between the ears." He snickers to himself darkly. "But that's not fucking me," he growls, snapping back to dead seriousness. "Might not be a  _ person,  _ but I'm not a monster either. Can  _ feel _ what's missing." A note of regret enters his voice, and he shakes his head, "I've been using you just as much, pet, to fill the emptiness inside. And I get it now. Why you've got to have those lines in the sand. Why you can't afford to admit a vampire could be something more than waiting dust." He shrugs one shoulder sadly. "But I'm nothing, Buffy. Nothing but your…" His eyes flick over the rest of the house, and he presses his lips closed on whatever he'd been about to say. "Yours. Do what you want with me, luv, and it doesn’t change who you are. Doesn’t-"

" _ Spike, _ " she hisses, "shut up." Blessedly, he does. This has gone on far too long - and far too loudly - with her gaping stupidly while he slaps her from one point to the next. She glances over her shoulder, ears pricked to Dawn's room; snoring. That one could sleep through anything. Then she swings her legs over the windowsill and makes her way down the roof.  


Grabbing Spike by the sleeve, she marches him around the house and down to the bottom of the garden, away from sleeping sisters and potential passersby. Once there, she drops her hold on him to cross her arms again. " _ What?" _ she asks.  


Up close, he looks…  _ unhinged  _ would not be inaccurate. His eyes are too wide, too dark, roiling with too many things. "I worked it out," he says, utterly guileless. "Worked everything out…" His focus drifts off into mid-air, and for the first time in a long while, a warning prickles down her spine at the lurking power of him. Then his attention jumps back to her, and he only looks familiarly irritated, and the warning fades. "Don't believe me, do you?"

"Believe what?" she asks slowly. There's been too much dumped out to make sense of, let alone form an opinion on. Except that parts of her already are; reaching for something just out of sight in it, a tiny golden key, a lie that would taste too sweet.  


"That I'll never match any of your definitions. That every time you try to squash me into one, something doesn't fit. That we work- that we  _ could  _ work, slayer, if you'd just give us a chance, if I… That it's because there's just something wrong about me."

"Oh there's something wrong with you, alright," she mutters.  


He snorts at the brush off, shaking his head like it's exactly what he expected. Then he looks at her,  _ really _ looks at her, falling still at last as his eyes travel over her face, throat, hair so intently that she can all but feel the touch of them. When he meets her eyes again, his are calmer. Settled, as though he's just come to grips with some decision. And softened, tender in that way that makes her feel… things.  


"I know. Gonna fix it," he says quietly, a hint of a smile on his lips. "Gonna prove it to you once and for all, luv, just you bloody wait." He casts a glance back towards the street, beyond it, and a shifting hint of fear colours his expression briefly. "Got to, um, head a ways off from here, though. Reckon you can manage without me for a bit?" He eyes her with anxious concern.

She means to say,  _ of course I can manage without you!  _ Or maybe,  _ I don't need you anyway.  _ But what comes out is, "You're leaving?" and her voice is horribly small.  


" _ Not _ leaving you," he growls. "Just need to… go do something. I'll always come back to you, slayer, you know it." He tries to smirk at her, but it sort of falls short and he gives it up with a sigh. "You going to be all right while I'm gone?" All of his earlier bravado and sharp insistence have evaporated, leaving him sounding only worried and torn.  


"Yes," she says quietly, despite her million questions and objections and a whole lot of  _ you just hold on there, buster. _ It matters, whatever he's on about, whatever he's not revealing. He wouldn't be talking about leaving her if it didn't. Not Spike. Maybe he's got a point - maybe he isn't exactly a proper vampire - but he's still not a man. He'll come back. He has to. So she can settle this worried part of him, before she tries to understand and put a stop to whatever sure-to-be-terrible wild idea he's come up with to 'fix' things this time.  


"You'd better," he threatens. "I get back and find you've got into any kind of trouble and I'll bleeding slaughter you myself." He glares at her for a moment, drilling the message home - then whirls on his heel and heads for the path back to the street.

"Wait!" she calls, taking a few steps after him. "You're going  _ now?" _

"No time like the present," he says jauntily, turning to walk backwards as he answers. He still looks afraid, under the skin, but there's a determined gleam in his eye that she knows well. She gives up trying to follow him.  


"Spike?" she asks quietly instead, and he pauses his backwards retreat to cock an eyebrow at her. She chews her lip, stuck with too many things to say to fit into the second or two she's caught him for. "Be careful?"  


He smiles, surprised and grateful, and it pangs straight through her. "Promise," he says firmly. "You too, yeah?"

"I will," she says, and means it.

He nods once, then he's gone.  


She stands on the back lawn in her pyjamas for what might have been a very long time, then creeps back inside, mind still swirling. 

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

She never asked him  _ how long  _ 'a bit' was. How far 'a ways off' was. She never had time to ask, 'what  _ for?' _ As the days all bleed together and become weeks, she rues her too-slow wits and too-passive body that night on the back lawn. But once in a while, deep in the dark, she thanks herself for them. Because if 'a bit' of time hasn't run out, he's still coming back.    
  


Riley did. The all-American action hero, appearing before the Doublemeat counter one night with an adventure waiting in his open hand (which now bore a gold wedding band). She took the adventure, took off for the night, took off her Doublemeat costume and dressed up in a different one. Just call her Demon Slayer Extraordinaire. There was no hint of grey in the uniform he lent her. Nor in the adventure at hand. Action heroes deal in Good Guys versus Baddies, and it's all very simple on their two-tone screen. It was nice to feel like a Good Girl for a change. Nice to be told she still fits the costume. Even though he doesn't know she's been fucking a vampire in scungy back corners, yowling out her pleasure to the stars like an angry alleycat. And not just any vampire.  _ Hostile 17. _ The one who refused to do what was expected of him. Of  _ it _ . The one who  _ disturbs _ Riley, more than he can ever admit. The one who pisses all over Riley's nice clean lines. She's glad, that night, that Spike is safely out of sight. For someone's sake. Perhaps all of theirs.   


She slayed the suvolte demon. She smashed its eggs. She listened to Riley compliment her speed at killing things, and her new, improved, much more practical short haircut, and all but clap her on the shoulder and say  _ you're heading in the right direction now, miss. _ Mrs Finn - _ Sam _ \- wears her hair in a very tidy ponytail and fits her uniform like it was made for her. Perhaps it was. Buffy’s is already itching by the time they're getting ready to leave, itching like ropes, like a muzzle, like a straightjacket.   


Riley asks about  _ Hostile 17 _ \- asks with all the irritation of having to actually do so to find out, asks with a vindictive little sliver of hopeful anticipation of a satisfying answer - and she stares at him silently for just a beat too long, thinking too much.   


They can't feel pain, the hostiles, not really. They may emulate human emotions, reactions, behaviours, but it's all a deception to assist them in hunting. The screams that echoed regularly through the Initiative were fake and self-serving. This is all in the manual, which he learnt by heart and she never opened. He doesn't believe it, of course. Not really. You wouldn't try to use pain to control a creature unless you think it can feel it. You wouldn't terrorise without fear. She wonders how Riley would respond if she made that point now. If he'd twist words inside out to hide the inconsistency, or simply tell her she doesn't understand. And she  _ doesn't  _ understand, anymore. How to split the world into black and white when everything's grey. How to hear someone scream out their fear and frustration to an indifferent desert sky and not ache to comfort them. How to switch your empathy on for needy sisters and demanding friends, then switch it off again to do your job. But Riley's made his choice, somehow, and it's probably the right one, so she doesn't try to shake it.   


She thinks about telling him the truth.  _ Spike? Oh, I've been sleeping with him. Fucking him, sucking him, cuffing him to the bed and riding him into it, but worst of all, sleeping with him. In his arms, tucked under his chin. Like lovers. And now he's gone and left like one. _ Riley, at least, would give her the look of disgust and disappointment she deserves for it. Would tell her just how very sick and wrong she is.   


But she looks at this man with his human soul who can so simply choose to soothe his conscience with convenient lies while walking past tortured screams, this man who  _ chooses  _ when to care and when not to… this man who  _ doesn't  _ care, not as she understands it, and she says, "He's out of town right now. On a mission for me."   


Riley frowns, shifts his stolid weight just a fraction away, and she knows it's not for the words she's just spoken but because of the ones she didn't; because of the subtle note of deadly warning in her tone that said,  _ He is mine. And I will kill you before I let you harm him. _ Which is ridiculous. She'd never hurt Riley. And Spike’s not hers. He's not even here.   


Then Riley's not either, having made his grand finale exit with his lovely wife on his flash helicopter, and she can breathe a sigh of relief and claw at her itchy skin.   
  
  


Xander's big day sneaks up from nowhere, from left-field, from her goofy gangly high-school buddy to this suit-wearing and  _ quietly  _ terrified… well,  _ man _ , young  _ adult  _ man, and just, when? Where did the year go, her friends go, her life go, her self-image and her ideas about the way of the world go?   


(Where did  _ Spike- _ not now.)

She hugs Xander's arm to her side and does her utmost to rein in the emotions that keep wanting to come pouring out in a blubby mess of smeared makeup, because he's getting  _ married,  _ to Anya, who he loves, and who loves him, and someone, someone in Sunnydale, in the world - a Xander-shaped someone - is  _ getting _ their happy ending. Christ, she's a basketcase. In a radioactive dress. Oh god, she wishes Spike was here (but not out loud, because there's at least two vengeance demons sitting out there on the bride's side of the hall).   


Tears successfully blinked away, she squeezes Xander's arm in support, luck, something, and they step out into the hall. Where  _ everyone _ wants to - needs to - simply  _ must  _ speak with Xander, right now, right this second please. His family and Anya's friends and people she's not certain either of them know. Mr Harris Senior is drunk and making a scene. A present has escaped. One with tentacles. Xander's getting paler by the moment and hands (ones which sadly are not tentacled, and thus cannot be dealt to by lobbing them off) are tugging at him from every side. The happy ending- Is In Peril.   


She slaps away the next hand reaching for Xander, and chases it back to its owner with a warning glare that silences them before they can object. Two more get the same treatment, tight fury building in her stomach as she moderates her strength down to an acceptable-for-humans level. Then there's a clear gap ahead of them, and she's marching Xander through, sharp orders snapping off her tongue to anyone else who looks like they might get in her way. They make it to the podium. From up there she spots Dawn, and delegates her to locating their missing present. The remainder of the crowd are a sea of strangers, a  _ restless  _ sea of strangers, an insults-starting-to-fly-across-the-aisle sea of strangers, and Xander's pale is turning towards a queasy shade of green which would make him look less out of place on the bride's side of the room than his own family's.   


"Buffy," he says in a quiet, pained voice.   


"I know," she assures him, scanning the crowd, drawing a battle plan in case she has to intervene.   


" _ Buffy!" _ he says again, more insistent. She jumps her eyes to him. "I think Anya's expecting a groom with  _ two  _ working arms," he squeaks.   


"Oh." She releases his arm from her death grip and tries to smooth out a crease in the fabric of it. "Sorry."

But he's already looking away, out at the gathered people, some of whom are still trying to speak to him, most of whom are now arguing loudly with each other or the opposing faction or both at once. He looks like he might need a bucket, whether to puke in or put over his head. "Twenty-four years happily married," he mumbles under his breath, watching his father sneer at his mother in outright repugnance.   


The happy ending is  _ still _ in peril. Do they even exist, outside of TV? She tries to think of one, and comes up empty. But  _ this  _ one will. It has to. She  _ needs  _ it to. She takes Xander's arm again, lightly, but with slayerly strength ready and waiting to lock it in place up here if anyone tries to drag him away. Including himself.   


A man breaches the front row of family and makes a grab at Xander, but she blocks with her body and shoves the man back. He's strong - too strong to be the old man he appears as - and shouting now, calling for a pause, important information, can't wait, etc etc. She turns to the bride's side, spots Hallie and D'Hoffryn in the front row. Almost the opposite of  _ friends _ of hers _ ,  _ but she knows their names and right now, she'll take what she can get. Pushy not-really-an-old-man gets shunted their way to take care of, with a hissed reminder about this being Anya's special day.   


And then she's there. And the music's playing, and she's laughing a nervous little titter of a laugh at it all, and everyone's sitting back down in their seats sheepishly, and Xander's beaming at her through his clammy face because she looks beautiful, really, really beautiful, and it - all - goes - perfectly.   


Until they've been pronounced married, and Anya gets carried away kissing Xander, and the fight erupts and so does a gatecrashing demon… but it doesn't matter anymore.   


At what's left of the reception, she watches the happy-ending couple dance, watches them watching each other and forgetting everything else, and the battle high of earlier fades and sinks down into a familiar glum despondency. At least she has one friend here.   


She'll never have this. The dress, the cake, the photographer. The  _ till death do they part. _ She's already dead. Or has been. Something. It gets hard to tell, at times, which one of them is living. Or  _ got _ . Maybe he'll come back alive, a real boy, and she'll have completed her transformation into dead marble, just another statue in the graveyard, and then they'll know for certain. Everyone will.   


He'd bring her flowers, if she was a statue.   


They'd been going to get married once, under the trees, Celine Dion playing while they danced their first dance. It was all a spell, and it ended before they'd settled the Celine Dion argument, but he'd have done it, last month, if she'd asked. He'd have done anything. She doesn't know what she was asking him for - a solution that doesn't exist, a way out of the mess of them - but she knows it wasn't for him to  _ leave.  _ She wanted - needed - to end things, but she never wanted to let him go. He was supposed to be the one who  _ wouldn't  _ go, no matter how hard she shook him. No matter how often she went. Or how far.

She worries that she's sent him on an impossible quest, an endless journey for a grail that was only ever the thinnest of fantasies.  _ Once he starts something, he doesn't stop until everything in his path is dead, _ Angel once said. But what if the path doesn't end? She worries that she hasn't sent him anywhere, that she's finally broken him, that he's finally done with her and here and didn't look back once he reached the town border and saw things outside of the sphere of her influence. She worries that she's finally broken him and he's… no. If he doesn't come back, it means he's done with her. 

She worries his solution might be to change her, turn her, curse her, bespell her, obliterate the watchers council and thus her role… whatever wild notion struck him that night. Spike isn't exactly known for his cool and patient common sense.

She worries.   


The happy-ending couple leaves the floor, and she makes her way over to them. Makes her excuses, makes her goodbyes; makes a necessity of a virtue and begs off to patrol. Willow’s taking Dawn home later. The troublemakers have all blown off the reception. She's done here. Time to take her cloud of despondency away from this happy place.   


In the darkness and open air she can let it out, unclip the leash of her black dog and let it roam freely. It doesn’t leave her side.   


Maybe it's the loneliness of the wedding, maybe it's the loneliness of the past year, maybe it's just that it's been  _ weeks _ now, but her feet lead her on autopilot to the door of Spike’s crypt. She stands there for a while, mind too blank to make a decision, then lets herself in.   


It shouldn't feel so empty without him. The aloneness so complete. He isn't, hasn't been, here; she can feel as much the moment she crosses the threshold. Something in her slumps a little further at that, and she knows it's why she's stayed away.   


There's broken glass scattered across the upstairs floor; the colourless shards of a whisky bottle, the smoky amber ones of what was once a tumbler. She tiptoes around them, avoiding the crunch of more things breaking under her feet.   


The fridge smells, a faint aroma of rot escaping its seals, molecules of purification slowly diffusing out into the air she's breathing. The decay of recently-living things, blood that once sustained life turning noxious and toxic as it falls apart cell by cell. She opens the door and stares into it for a long time, then adjusts the thermostat down as low as it goes. The motor clicks on, humming quietly as it works to freeze the process of decomposition into so much inert ice. She closes the door on it gently.

Downstairs the bed is cold and still, and she creeps into it like a thief. The leftover scents of her own bath products and his cigarettes drown out any trace of him. The darkness is complete without candles, the silence too loud, and in her blind vision, the ceiling feels like it's inching closer. She closes her eyes and ignores it as long as she can, willing the ice of cold sheets to penetrate her skin, willing it to permeate her own red liquid and arrest the seeping poison of the grave. Nothing comes.   


Targetlessly frustrated, she gets up and leaves.

  
  
  


It was the stupidest fucking idea he'd ever bloody had in an unnaturally long lifetime of them.   


And it was the only good one.

No thanks to him (blinking idiot that he was, is, would be even if he'd had a complete brain transplant along with this utter transformation of the intangible self), the choice itself being a blind and near spur-of-the-moment decision made from frustration and spite almost as much as anything else. Frustration, spite, and… the feeling of someone rooting around inside the empty shell of him, scratching at the walls until her fingers ran red, searching and searching for something that wasn't and shouldn't be there. He could have taken her out, but he bloody fell in love with her in there. With the weight of her in that hollow, pain notwithstanding. And then every damn inch of reddened wall had begun to itch and nag whenever she stepped away from them, all of it a vestigial space made newly noticeable for the cavern it was. She was also rather fond of pointing it out, in case he forgot. So from that discomforting sensation, and the urge to prove to her once and for bloody all that souls were insignificant things really when compared to hearts, he damn well went and demanded one.

(Reasons grew, along the way, feeding into his stubborn determination to do or die. There was Loyd's mocking laughter, for one; the way the demon didn't believe in the slightest that he, William the Bloody, Slayer of Slayers, could possibly have it in him to beat his stupid trials. There was the knowledge that he'd left her, left her alone in her darkness and struggle, left her when she needed him most, and the fear that if he didn't catch hold of this stupid thing she stupidly needed him to have then she was going to drown there.  _ He _ was going to drown her there.)

And so here he is, with this thing he claimed blindly and only truly recognises his need for through its lens, wondering what the hell he was thinking with… well, everything he's ever done, screaming at the hell of everything he's ever done, Loyd's laughter as he crawled from the wanker's cave still ringing distantly behind the screaming in his ears because this was the joke, wasn't it; not that he couldn't succeed, but that he might.   


He's too scared to move, to risk influencing the world by any tiny degree, because his influence is bad bad bad and there isn't earth enough to bury the poison of him.   


He doesn't know how long it's been, since the cave. How many times the sun's risen and set while he lies curled here in the earth and leaves and branches, listening to the screaming and sometimes adding to it. But, gradually, he begins to realise that it has been some amount of longness. And that he has a new choice to make.   


Staying put is the default option. The little creatures crawling through the earth around him agree. The screaming in his head agrees.  _ He _ agrees. But. He told her he would come back. He promised to be careful, and to come back. She's wrong, so very wrong to want him to. But she isn't wrong to ask for what she wants. And she never bloody gets it.

(The world is a howling vortex of wrongness with him at its centre, burrowing to bury it, burrowing down down down to turn himself inside out and hope to swallow his own ungodly life force. The magnetic poles of  _ right  _ and  _ wrong  _ have been reversed, undone, right obliterated and wrong spinning, spinning, spinning on the linchpin of him and suddenly demanding his notice. But. Then there's her. Right and wrong and neither, not fitting anywhere and felt everywhere. Buffy, just Buffy, with her simple request.)

So he drags himself out of the earth and leaves and branches, out into a heap on the ground in the last light of dusk. His body is one big wound, inside and out, a single kaleidoscope of different colours of pain. The physical part helps. Steals a few nerve receptors away from the other kind; floods them over well enough to jumble up the screams. All the same, it comes with an unhelpful side of incapability, muscles and tendons that refuse to work right when they're told. He lies there for a minute, two, staring at an arm that won't listen. Dead like the rest of him should be.   


Trying to trap him here. Against her wishes. A weary sigh stretches through him, then he gets on with  _ making  _ it help him crawl to the nearest tree.   


The tree gets him to his feet. And then he starts walking. 

  
  
  


A sheaf of papers in hand, she hunts in the midday sun. Hunts people, hunts humans, hunts for the hideout of three little boys turned murderers. She's  _ saved  _ Jonathan. More than once. And now a girl is dead.   


This isn't her job. Jurisdiction. The question of why the boy who once proudly presented her with her Class Protector award would now be complicit in the murder and murder-cover-up of a young woman is not hers to answer. But she's asking herself anyway. Whether Katrina's death is her fault, for failing to take her  _ arch nemesis-es _ seriously. Whether she should have gone ahead with her plan to confess her responsibility for it.   


(( She turned back into the alleyway, and Spike was still lying where she'd left him, beaten so badly it made her stomach churn. She picked him up, fighting the urge to vomit out her insides, to spew more of the toxicity she's composed of out onto the blood-splattered concrete.   


Halfway back to the crypt he'd roused enough to mumble brokenly into her ear, "You came back." She wished he sounded angry, or even afraid. Not grateful.   


She couldn’t say she'd always intended to. Couldn’t apologise. "Yes," she whispered.   


"It wasn't your fault," he slurred.   


It was. His blood was on her bruised fists, and the hand dangling limp over her shoulder stabbed accusation with every unmarred knuckle of it. She said nothing.   


"You were only… trying to help her," he added.

She missed a step, stumbled and almost dropped him, earning herself a grunt of pain that would probably have been a shriek were he not so… hurt. Her lungs couldn't even manage that much, compressed as they suddenly were.   


Blankness reigned for a while.   


There was swift, shallow panting beside her ear, Spike breathing through the pain of it all. The sound dragged her back.   


"I know," she told him, very gently. "It's okay, Spike." It wasn't, nothing was, ever could be again, but he trusted her lies and relaxed towards unconsciousness again. ))

The police hold no powers of absolution for her failings. No one does. She shakes herself, and checks the next address. 

  
  


In one reality, Anya and Dawn sit with her while Willow and Xander attempt to capture a demon. With Tara.   


(( "We're gonna need more muscle," Xander announces, double-checking the tranq gun. "Someone to throw at it while we wait for this to kick in."

Willow nods, sharp, decisive, having swiftly taken charge again with Buffy… she's not sure what she is.   


"Go over there now," Willow orders, glancing at the window. "It's getting dark."

Xander grimaces and holsters the gun, and comprehension of who and where they're talking about slowly seeps in.

"He's… not there," she says in a very small voice.   


No one takes any notice.   


"Spike’s not there," she says, louder, almost shrill.  _ Not there not there not there- _

Faces stare at her, waiting for more words.

"He's gone away," she admits softly. "I'll do it." She tries to stand up to do so, but then she's not there either.   


When she next blinks into their strange little demon-hunting world, Tara's been summoned to lend the strength they need, and she's being babysat by Anya and Dawn. ))

It was nice of her, she thinks, to arrange things so that Willow and Tara can have their happy ending too. It's always easier to say goodbye to fictional friends when the story closes in a good place.   


Dawn’s a problem though. Buffy studies her across the coffee table, her not-real mystical key of a sister. It's her, she suspects, who keeps yanking her back here now. She needs to be taken care of, somehow. Why didn't she leave with Spike?   


Anya goes to check the front door again, check the hall phone again, anxious for something to do while her manfolk is out facing danger.   


Dawn leans forward and asks in a low, heated tone, "Where's Spike gone, Buffy?"   


She doesn't know how to answer that, so she closes her eyes and wills herself away too. Go away, go away, go a-way…   


There's peace in off-white rooms, hope in the faces of her parents there. Tranquillity on offer if she can hold on without tranquillisers. Her mother holds her hand and tells her everything will be okay.

Then her friends rip that from her too.

  
  
  


Sleeping's impossible; did it ever exist? Sunlight blazes down hour after hour, scorching, blistering, burning, waiting, inviting, offering its fiery death to any unclean thing that steps too close to its brilliance. From the shelter of bridges and the hollows under bushes he watches it emerge to bathe the earth, swallowing up shadow as it comes, hotter and hotter until the air simmers over the asphalt. Behind him, around him, hiding in this place it cannot quite touch with him are his dreadful retinue, whispering, hissing their screams and sobs as he holds them down here until dusk.   


He doesn't dare look at them. Learnt that lesson early. Eyes open, fixed to the road ahead, waiting, only waiting. Darkness will fall again and he will be able to continue his onwards march, closer and closer to the only fiery creature of death who has claim to him.   


Heatwave shimmer and the white light of midday are the emptiest, the hardest to hold onto himself through. Strangers luring him to forget. He grits his teeth and rubs at raw eyes, scratches at skin feebly to ground himself. Finally shadows begin to slide back, creeping, inching by slow degrees as the sun falls. It's in the last slivers of that deadly light she's closest, and no, he was wrong; these are the hardest. Beams of rich, pure gold that would taste like boiling champagne while they devour his tongue. He rubs at the burn one hand, red raised lines where he tried once to touch them, and remembers again that she's closer here in angry skin.   


Then the thing is gone again, and he can crawl out on stiffened limbs to look for her in golden wisps of sunset cloud.   


The ghosts come with him, bleeding out of him, gaining strength as insomnia becomes a hallucinogen. Nightmare would be preferable to this waking horror show, but every attempt to sink into one is interrupted by those damn screams. His throat hurts from the serration of them, and soon, he thinks, hopes, fears, soon it'll be dry enough to let him snatch a few minutes rest.   


Death is on his heels, staining the road with his sin at every step, trying to glue him to it beside the rigid corpse of an unlucky hare. He strokes the creature's velvet-soft ears and bids it a regretful goodbye. Places to be. Someone to see. Sorry, little bugger.   


The shadow-shade of its leaping form joins the rest for a while, and he stops and looks over his shoulder at it in bemusement. Must be a different one. An idle swerve of the car one night, eyelights reflecting at him from the roadside and him deciding to put them out, just because. Can't even remember, but it feels like the sort of thing he'd do. He's a killer, non-discriminatory. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of bodies behind him without so much as faces to their vague forms, all a mass of choking screams, rush and crunch and silky hair and fluttering hearts. Individuals no more. But that girl's near the front of them again now, the one whose name he can never quite catch as she hisses it, lost and gone. Short dark hair, luscious hips, a face he does remember; chosen, plucked from the crowd at the Bronze precisely, damned by the slayer's name on her lips, damned by association. Damned by his hands roping her up for Dru, by the order given to turn the chit once she'd fed. Distraction for the slayer, all she was. Knock her off her game with a familiar face to slay.   


_ Oh fuck- _ He's done it again, let himself look. Look at these shadows of people he's slaughtered like so many cattle and god does he get it now; why he can't be, why she can't afford to let him be one.

  
  
  


There's been talk about her, behind her back. She becomes aware of this when she walks into the magic box one evening and everyone's sitting at the table, and the table is tensely silent. She asks herself if she cares, and decides she does not. Maybe they've realised their mistake at last; maybe they're discussing how to send her back. She asks herself if she'd care if they were, and that question's much harder to answer on the spot.

The answer comes later, much later, in dust blowing on the breeze. There's satisfaction in doing her job - this job, the unpaid one - even with all of the twisting and turning and tangling-in-knots she's been doing lately over the technicalities of the ethics of it. Because when she's actually  _ doing  _ it, when it's her hands and a vampire's fangs, heart beating fast in her chest and voice effortless, everything else melts away. Thinking stops and feeling takes over (if she could just find enough vampires to slay, perhaps she wouldn't miss the escape of a certain one so much). And how slaying  _ feels  _ is right. Necessary. Brutal and bruising and bloody, and necessary. And she's built to take the bruises. She's not like other girls. But someone has to be different, to keep them safe.

Job satisfaction. It's a reason not to quit.

Besides. She promised she'd be careful.  _ For how long, Spike?   
_

He felt right when she was doing him too. At that she barks a deranged little laughing-sound that dies in a sigh, then sits down on the nearest flat tombstone and covers her face with her hands. Being with him had felt right, and wrong, and everything in between. Being with him had  _ felt.  _ And not like other vampires. Different enough to keep  _ her _ safe.   


God, she misses him. Misses him with an ache that ebbs and flows but never eases. Misses the old them, before everything got so messed up; misses his warm chuckling laughter, and their comfortable silences, and the way he always had a smile cocked and loaded just for her. Misses how things were before she got so scared. Before he did. Misses the times when she would forget everything  _ was _ so messed up, when rough sex would mingle with snippets of laughter and all of it felt like living.   


She could have put a stop to it at any moment before he did, and maybe things would have been okay. Put a stop to the affair;  _ told _ him why she'd started it, exactly what she was trying to use it for, why it wasn't working anymore. Told him how sorry she is. Or, put a stop to the lies, to the deceit, to the hole she'd dug herself into until it trapped her. Confessed. What she'd been doing with Spike, and what she'd done to him. What he can be, and what she can. Spat out all of her crimes, and asked her friends to judge her for them. Asked him to.

But now it's too late. He's not here, and nothing is okay. 

  
  


"We've been w-worried about you," Tara stammers. She must have drawn the short straw at the magic box the other night, been handed the 'low-key intervention' script that no one wanted the responsibility of. She shakes her head to discard it, then amends, " _ I'm  _ worried about you, Buffy. If you're struggling with what happened, with the glarghk guhl… the demon, or if there's something else going on… If you need someone to talk to. I'm listening."

She is. Soft doe eyes and that lopsided smile that radiates tenderness. Buffy has to look away. There's no judgement here, no punishment, only gentle empathy. She could spill it all out here in the Doublemeat staffroom, and Tara would try to understand.   


_ You people pull me out and drag me back then ask me to assuage your consciences when I look whiplashed- Spike used to rest his cool fingers on the back of my neck and the feeling would ease, and I hated him for it- We once fucked like rabid hyenas on the back porch while you were all eating dinner inside, and I  _ _ liked _ _ it, got off on it, thrilled to it- There's a vicious streak in me, cruel and merciless and vile, that doesn't  _ _ want _ _ to care that he feels it when I scathe him with my tongue while he makes love to me, or maybe it really does and enjoys that too- I want to make love to him, just once, but I'm scared I won't be able to, and just as scared that I will- I think that bad case of sunburn you mentioned has cauterized my nerves and is slowly turning them to ashes- Sometimes I think I could murder all of you and shack up in a vampire nest, just to make things black and white again- He lets me hurt him as a proxy for myself, and we both know it, but he doesn't know the blade's double-sided- Sometimes I think I should offer to fuck them all before I stake them, and where does whoring sit next to execution?- He thinks he can save me by dragging me under, and I let him because saving myself is too hard- He  _ _ was _ _ saving me, every day, but I didn't want him to- What it was costing him was killing me- It's all so hard on my own- _

_ He's gone, Tara, and I don't know when he's ever coming back or if he should, and it's all my fault.   
_

But she knows how it would go. Like last time.   


(( "Do you love him?" Tara asks.

She can't answer that, even to herself. Both options are wrong. Two opposing walls, squashing down on her.

"I-It's okay if you do. He's done a lot of good, and- and he does love you," Tara says, and it sounds so light in her voice. Simple. "A-and Buffy, it's okay if you don't. You're going through a really hard time, and you're…"

"What?" she gasps. "Using him?" She is, oh how she is, whatever she does or doesn’t feel. Is it worse to be using someone if you love them? It's worse, so very much worse when they love you. "What's okay about that?" she asks, demands, begging the lash of truth from someone else's lips.

Tara, sweet, kind,  _ principled _ Tara, lets her down. "It's not that simple."

"It is!" she begs. "It's wrong. I'm wrong. Tell me that I'm wrong, please…"   


She falls apart into sobs, but Tara only strokes her head soothingly. ))

Tara's openness is an outstretched palm, inviting her to lay all her cards out where she can see them. Guiding her eyes to the truths she already holds. She doesn't need to tell her anything.   


Buffy nods. "I know. It was, um, a head spinner. The glar-ghoul. But it's fading. Really. I'll get over it."   


Tara smiles again, lips together this time. She's heard the fob off and respects it, but sympathy rolls off her all the same.   


_ I could horrify you, sweet Tara. _ God, what is wrong with her? It's the tortured animal rotting in her chest, thrashing about blindly as it dies. "You can pass that on," she tells her, shuffling in her plastic seat. "Buffy’s on the mend. No lasting insanity." She wants to laugh, cackle, sob. The smile she's slapped on stings a little. "I might take a night off this week," she adds chirpily. "Catch up on sleep." Let them think they've done something, then they'll leave her alone.

Tara nods, gathers herself to go. Shakes her head awkwardly in apology. "They're worried because they care, Buffy. They just don't know how to help."

"I know," she murmurs. She doesn't know either. "But I'm doing okay."

"H-have you heard from him?" Tara asks softly. They’re beyond the  _ pass that on _ now and into private confidences. Tara's kept her word, kept her secret, is a deep well they can all pour into without fear. Buffy’s glad she's back on the team, straddling the edge though she is. Perhaps she can draw out what's going on with the newlyweds, because Buffy doesn't have room enough to poke into it. Or maybe she just doesn't really care.

"No," she whispers.   


More sympathetic smiles. "I c-could do a locating spell, if-"

"No!"  _ Yes. No. Please. Don't.  _ "No," she repeats, less desperately. "It's okay." Limbo is preferable to wrong answers. She lives her life in limbo. Or… inhabits it there.   


"Okay," Tara repeats.

Buffy leaves work early and hurries home to Dawn, guilt managing a weak thrash of its own. 

  
  
  


He retraces his steps, but his footprints only get deeper. There's no rewinding them up from the earth. Everything's a circle and he's stuck in a loop: Walking. Running. Walking. Crawling to a halt to stare down at himself in astonishment; what the fuck is he doing, going back there? He's the weapon of her destruction, the blade she impales herself on. Once more he's on his way to Sunnydale to bag himself a slayer, and the third time unlucky death is sure to stick. Best thing he could do for her would be to stay away.

(( Buffy watches Angel get in his car and leave, and he watches her pack her rare vulnerability back away. The sky's lightening swiftly now, sunrise's approach raising the hairs on the back of his neck, but as long as she stands near the shadows he can keep watching over her.   


Angel's engine has long since faded into the distance by the time she turns to him, eyes a blanker mask than any in Dru’s dolls. "It's the best thing for both of us," she murmurs, Angel's words on repeat, then shakes her head. "What are you doing here, Spike?"

He sighs, looks at the ground to avoid the pull of a mother's grave behind them. "Walking home, I reckon."

She nods dully, and starts walking. There's no acknowledgement when he slinks up beside her, but she sticks to the shady side of the streets the whole way.

Outside the house, she stops and turns her face to him. Something flickers on it briefly; the smallest twitch of a shrug, perhaps. Something that says he's not what she needed, but she's glad he was there anyway. ))

Could be argued the best thing for her would have been to leave her in her grave. But he didn't get a say on that one, so he doesn't need to ask himself whether it's true.   


Neither did she.   


Whatever he does is going to be wrong - made wrong by the him doing it, if not already so - and he can't make head nor tail of any of it, however many times he stumbles to a halt to have this debate. Only fact that ever rises to the surface is that she  _ told _ him what she wanted, and whether it's for the best or worst… it's about time someone gave her that power back.   


So he gets up and puts one foot in front of the other again, walking. Until the ghostly shades of too-faded memories come howling back at his heels, grabbing, grasping, all of his own making and unshakeable, screaming their endless  _ why? _ , and he runs again, runs from them, runs from himself, runs towards the only safety there can be, behind her fists or below her stake, he doesn't care anymore, and yeah, it's unfair, these demons of his own design riding shotgun back to her door, but God it's too much all too much and panic overtakes rational thought again. 

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

She's lost in thought again, lost in dead dreams and shredded fantasies, lost in regrets and resentments, lost with her eyes on the damp concrete under her feet as she wanders down a deserted midnight street, when some background alert from her subconsciousness drags her back to herself. She stills her feet and looks up.   


Thirty yards away, Spike’s standing motionless in the middle of the road, staring back at her.   


She hopes. It wouldn't be the first time her eyes had lied to her, taking a swish of black fabric and a trick of the moonlight and making him of them. And there's always the possibility that she's slipped off her sanity stand again, shaken together a waking dream and some aftereffect of glur-gull venom to conjure him up here before her.   


But she knows. Knows deep in her gut, down behind all the decaying things. It's why she hasn't moved, frozen in place like someone's cut the power to the song she was drifting to, the needle screeching as it carves a mark.

He looks awful. Without that instinctive recognition, she'd not have been certain this _was_ him. His chest is bare beneath his coat, raw grazed flesh and bones jutting starkly from too much cavernous shadow. His jeans are low slung past indecency, the bottoms slumping wetly onto bare feet. But she's seen him roughed up before. She's  _ roughed _ him up before, if not quite like this. She's never seen him looking so…  _ haunted _ .   


Her feet have carried her closer before she wonders whether that's a good idea. Wasn't she telling herself something about a need to be extra cautious when she finally saw him again, all those weeks ago? It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. She's  _ been  _ careful, all this time, used up all her careful. She's missed him too much. And he's hurt, somehow, the pain of something more than skin-deep cringing his posture.   


That's what stops her. A flash of insight into a horrible possibility she'd been ignoring; that something could have happened to prevent him from coming back. That she should have searched for him.   


"What happened?" she asks, and her voice doesn't sound right. But she needs to know.   


Spike makes a low, breathy sound that's not quite a snicker and not quite a sob, then licks his lips nervously. He hasn't stopped staring at her from the moment she first saw him doing so; she knows this because she hasn't stopped staring at him.   


"It was a long way," he says finally, and his voice is as raw and ragged as the abrasions on his skin. But it still sounds so right. "That’s all."

She swallows, digesting this. "You came back."

He snorts. "That I did." There's layers on top of layers in the way he says it, and she can't decipher any of them. But none are even in a nearby universe to the triumphant  _ see, bitch? _ return he'd set out aiming for.   
  


(( It's the right thing to do. All laid out in big books of law, undeniable. She  _ killed  _ a girl, and now she has to tell them what she's done. Then they'll take her away.   


She's going to do the right thing, for once.

But, once again, Spike won't let her. His hand's around her arm, a vice-tight band trying to hold her to the cliff edge. She's already fallen, but he'll still be trying to save her when he's dragged down with her.   


"I  _ have _ to do this. Just let me go," she tells him desperately.   


"I can't. I love you," he says, thrusting it out as a lifeline.

She can't let herself take it. "No, you don't," she hisses through gritted teeth. Shouldn't. Mustn't.  _ Don't, Spike, please. _

"You think I haven't tried not to?" he spits, despair quaking through frustration. Destruction's rushing towards them, and he  _ can't  _ give her up even in the face of it.

But she thinks still can. She hits him with all of her strength, throwing him back across the alleyway, through a pile of old crates to a hard landing on the stony group, far away from her oncoming collision. "Try harder," she grits out, biting down on the order, forcing it inside herself.   


He gets back to his feet, game face on as he surrenders the cliff edge, and she knows she can't change his choice. It wasn't one. He loves her, no matter where it takes him. ))  
  


"Why?" she asks in a near-whisper.

He winces like she's stung that invisible wound with it. Darts his eyes over his shoulder towards the road behind him in a nervous, hunted glance. "Made a promise, didn't I?" he asks. "Was the right thing, wasn't it? What you wanted?" He's watching her like he has no idea, waiting anxiously for an answer only she can provide.   


"Yes," she says, though it's not really, not right at all that his love should drag him back to her hell.

He sags from his hunted tension, closes his eyes. "Good." His balance wavers without the aid of vision, and she takes a step closer, ready to catch him if he falls. Rightly or wrongly, whether he should have escaped her or not, he's here now. And she can't feel anything but thankful for it.

"We need to get you…" Off the street, before he does fall down. "To the crypt," she decides. She'll light the candles, if he still has his lighter, and the place will fill up again with gentle dark-light and the aura of post-death life. She's been dead alone too long to tear the rest of her questions out here.

He nods without opening his eyes, draws in a breath and the fragments of whatever strength his obviously bone-weary body has been running on. Opens his eyes to the ground and takes a numb step.   


She stops him with a hand on the front of his shoulder. "Your feet are bleeding." She's wincing at the sight of them, and further at the way he does at her touch. Turns her back on his scratched and torn flesh, and offers it to him. "Here. I'll carry you."   


"Shouldn't," he murmurs sadly.   


"I don't like that word anymore," she says tightly. "Do what you're told. Get on."   


He sighs in resignation and lifts his arms over her shoulders, leans his weight onto her, determinedly impersonal with every necessary point of contact. Her throat thickens, and she picks him the rest of the way up in silence.   


By the time they reach the corner, he's clinging to her so tightly that her bones are creaking under his trembling muscles. Her throat thickens further, and it's hard to breathe. But for the first time in so many weeks, her broken edges are being held together. 

  
  


She puts him down on the couch, and both of them draw back from any eye contact. Her thoughts feel like a looming avalanche of jagged rock, cowing her head. First aid kit. Start with what she can. She fetches it, lights candles, orders his bloodied feet onto the coffee table. The pads of them are almost one big wound, scraped and grazed by a million tiny cuts. She finds a chunk of glass in one spot, carved through what should be impenetrable skin by the degree of wear to it. It seems to drag lacerating through her stomach when she draws it out, but he doesn't so much as twitch. She cleans layers and layers of dried blood from his unresisting skin as best she can, then covers everything in clean white bandages. Tucking the end of the last one in, she bends her head to press her lips to the bare skin of his ankle.

"Don't," he murmurs in the same sad tone from earlier. His eyes are closed, and it's the first sign of awareness he's given since they arrived.   


"Don't what?" she asks in an unsteady voice. "Don't be  _ kind? _ I've tried, Spike. I've done nothing  _ but _ try."

He opens his eyes and gives her that  _ look _ , the one that challenges her to throw everything on him. A little aloof, a little uncaring; both patently false. And tonight, so far beyond worn out.

So is she. "I never asked you to fall in love with a dead girl," she bites out, before looking down at her knees. "I never asked to see the person inside your fangs." She shakes her head, staving off tears in a furious  _ snap _ of that avalanche. "I've tried and tried to make you nothing but cold death, but I still burn with life when I give myself to you. I tell myself not to care how much I hurt you, but it always carves me up inside. I  _ make _ myself let you go so I won't destroy us both, but you - you snatch me back every time," she hisses. "And then you come back, despite it all." Her voice falters out on her. "I never wanted to love you enough to have to stay here," she whispers. "But I've been being careful. Like you said. I've been so careful, Spike…"

He pulls his feet away and sits up, drawn as ever to the sound of her pain. But she needs to finish. She leans away from him, raises a hand to forestall any interruption.   


"It was wrong, what I was doing to you.  _ I'm _ all wrong, twisted and toxic and rotten inside. I don't know if I  _ can _ be kind. But I have to try, because I don't want to let you go anymore. I have to stop chasing that pain, Spike, or I'll kill us both."   


She can feel his eyes on her, but he says nothing and she can't seem to drag hers off the floor.

She's the one shaking now, a tremble buried in her bones, growing with each passing second of silence. The thought has been much too slow forming, but she's finally putting together that it's far too late. Everything about Spike tonight screams  _ broken, _ and she's been fooling herself to pretend she could fix any of her gruesome handiwork with a couple of feet of bandaging and a long-overdue admission. He's come back to end this the only way it was ever going to be, and she's saved herself to let him. Her head's going fuzzy, hollow, full of muffled static, that flapping thing inside her dying at last.   


There's a cool palm on the curve of her neck and shoulder, the sensation coming through distant and swimmy. She waits for the prick of a needle, the prick of fangs, something clear and painful. Then he shakes her by it, jarring and sharp, knocking the fuzziness all about until it compresses and she can see him staring at her from a few inches away.   


"Buffy!" he snaps.

She blinks a few times, tries to focus. He doesn't look like he wants to eat her. He looks worried. And right here. "Sorry. Yes. Spaced."   


"Christ," he spits. "You nearly fell off the table."

She can feel his other hand now, steadying her by the arm. She draws in a breath, stiffens her spine. "I'm okay. Sorry. There was…" Oh, what does it matter. "Aftereffect," she summarises.   


His grip on her softens, but he doesn't let go. She wants to ask him not to, tell him she didn't mean to. But she was supposed to be looking after him for once.

"Put your head down," he tells her gruffly. "You're as white as… me."

She does, dropping it between her knees. "You can let go now. Put your feet back up before they get dirty."

He does, slowly. "Aftereffect of what?" he asks quietly, probably to fill the space while he works out how to tell her he's done with her, done.

"Stinging demon. It's dead. Just left me a little space-trip prone this week. It's almost worn off." She rubs her face, then stands up. "I'll go and get you some food. Um, more- more bandages. Your chest looks sore." Hers is, and she's all in pieces again.   


"Buffy…" he says warningly.

"And smokes, maybe? What else do you need?" she jabbers.

"Sit down," he growls. "We're talking."

She doesn't want to have this conversation. But she can see he's ready to get up if she refuses, and then he'll be the one falling over. She sits.

"Forget what I said," she says quickly. "I mean- not the part about being kind. Just, um, it's fine." It  _ was _ fine. Fine for weeks, feelings numb, her shell slowly hardening into stone, everything falling away. Now he's here and everything's the opposite of fine and her feelings are splurting out of the cracks the sight of him's made.

" _ We _ were wrong, yeah," he says gently. "But you're not, luv." He watches her with those gentle, tender eyes for long, slowing beats, and some of her scrabbling-at-the-walls feeling eases, despite herself. The looking-at-Buffy look is still there, and it's an anchor to cling to. The hauntedness from earlier is still there too, and oh fuck, she's just puked weeks - months - of secret turmoil onto his lap when he's barely able to hold himself sitting, hasn't she? No wonder he doesn't know what to do with it. Or her. She hasn't even asked where he's been all this time. Walking, from the state of him.  _ Why? _   


He shakes his head slowly in regret, drops his eyes from hers. "Should never have said that to you. Wasn't true. Knew it then, just wanted it to be. Thought I could-" He huffs a bitter breath of a laugh. "Thought I was helping you, for what it's worth. Didn’t… I didn't know, Buffy."

Her chest still hurts, panging to the broken sound in his voice. It's easy, suddenly, so much easier than biting down on the urge ever was, to move from her seat on the edge of the table to his side on the couch. "You were," she tells him quietly. "You do, Spike." She presses her lips together, wondering if she's said too much, if she’s just crossed the line into begging him to try again to love her.   


He searches her face slowly, seeming to search inside himself at the same time. When his expression settles, it's back to bitter regret. "Helped you when I told you you'd only ever be happy in the dark, did I?"   


"No," she murmurs. "But whenever you found me there, you made it easier to bear."   


There's a painful look of longing on his face now, like he's wishing that it could be true. Whatever he's been through, it's stripped him of all his fierce self-confidence along with his shirt, and somehow now it's not her words that are haunting him but his own.   


She bites her lip, picking through words carefully. "I came to you because I was miserable. And you took me away from it. Then you started taking away some of the misery, but I didn't… want that. It was… too scary. In all sorts of ways." She swallows. "So I tried to- no, I  _ did _ bring the misery back. But it didn't have to be like that.  _ You _ didn't make it like that. And I don't want that any more. It's been so hard without you. And I've missed you so much. But I… I'll understand, if this is all too late." She feels naked, defenceless now if he pushes her away.

She can see the moment his resistance crumples, all of his strange reluctance falling away. "God help us," he chokes out. "Buffy, I'm still an utter fool for you."

It's okay, then, to touch him like she's needed to since first lifting her head on the street. Since that weeks-ago night on the back lawn. Since forever. She reaches for him and he opens his arms for her, lets her in where she needs to be, gives himself to her again when all she ever does is take and take and use him up. His bones are starved sharp under his skin, and still offered out for her to strip more from. She just  _ needs  _ so much to cling to. "I'm sorry," she cries. Sorry for being too broken to help. Sorry for breaking him too. Sorry for making him drag himself back here just to be dumped on again. Sorry for everything she is and everything she isn't.   


He shudders at the words, shudders in a way that turns into shaking, turns into bitten-back, strangled-off sobbing, turns into him sliding down until he's the one buried in her chest and clinging on for dear life, like he's run all the way here with the hounds of hell behind him and can only finally stop in her arms. Like she's everything he needs.   


And suddenly it doesn't matter what else she is or isn't. He hasn't fallen out of love with her at all. And he hasn't come back because he's incapable of staying away. Or to bag his third slayer. He's come back because she needs him - has just spent however long secretly squashing this trembling desperation down inside himself because she needs him. And he's come back because right now, he needs her.   


She doesn't know what the hell happened out there; what kind of fool's errand he's been on for her that has done this. But it doesn't matter. He's here now. She's still here, like she promised. She can look after him, even if she is a bit broken. She's still strong. It's time to use that to fix things, because she's tired of tearing them apart. She adjusts her arms to cover more of him and croons softly, "It's okay, Spike. You're here now. We'll work it out."

He laugh-sobs, a ragged, pained sound of dark irony and hope. She can feel him fighting his shaking back under control, himself back under control, drawing all of his desperation and strange fear back inside. She wants to tell him not to; to let it surge out to crush her like she deserves. To put it all on her, like she once did him. It would only be fair. But it wouldn't help him any more than it did her. Soulless demon or no, he still loves her too much not to feel her pain. Still cares, even when he shouldn't. She's so sick of  _ shouldn't.   
_

He sighs a steadying breath, tense muscles softening slightly. Then pulls back enough to look away, look casual, look like he didn't just completely lose his grip. She mimics his sigh, trying to think, trying to remember how to be calm and patient. Everything's been so scrambled lately.   


"I really do need to go and get you some food," she says quietly. "And to clean up the rest of you." Her thigh is cold and wet where his jeans have saturated her skirt, and she suspects her top is worse. He hates being wet. Focus on that, not the fact that his bare chest looks like he fell off a moving train.   


"There's, uh, in the fridge," he halters out, with a mildly annoyed glance from his bandaged feet to the kitchen.   


"I froze it," she tells him. She really did, didn't she? Froze everything, just put it all on ice to try to slow the decay without him. A better person would have attempted to make some forward progress, prepared to suit action to words when he returned. But she didn't know how, without him at her side. "Everything was going off. It'll need cleaning out." Does he know how very long it's been?  _ Where  _ has he been?   


He frowns to himself, then looks at her questioningly before the expression is taken over by knowing irony.

"Thirty-four days," she says. "Thirty-three now." Time is something she's lost the knack for, all sense for, any comprehension of. But back-lawn-night she wrote on the calendar, when she felt it slipping like the rest; set down in ink so that one day she would know how long 'a bit' was. So that silly childish faith could make his eventual return true.   


"Fuck," he murmurs, though he doesn't look too surprised. "Didn’t mean to take so long, pet."

"Where did you go?" she asks, direct. He's empty-handed, but something about him says he did whatever he meant to.   


"For a walk," he says, evasive.   


She huffs through her nose. Explanations will come eventually, no doubt. He can never keep his mouth shut for long.  _ Except for when it really matters _ . She casts her eyes over him again, searching for the difference she can't put her finger on, the thing faintly wigging her senses beneath all the grime and weariness. All she sees is those raw grazes and starving bones. "I'll run home; there's some blood in the freezer there."   


He nods quickly. "Good plan." Too quickly, maybe. Like he's desperate for her to go.   


She bites her lip as she stands up. "You, um, you'll be here when I get back, right?"

He points at his feet. "Not going to mess up your handiwork, slayer."

"Okay..." she says slowly. She still feels like he's hiding something she needs to know about, that it'll come sliding out the moment her back is turned. But she can't sit here and force him to spill before she'll feed him. "I'll be quick."

He nods again, looking perfectly, falsely, blasé. She's at the door before he calls out a rushed, "Buffy?" She looks back, and he swallows something down. "See you soon," he says instead.   


"You will," she says assuringly, testing.   


Something clicks in his expression, and he settles back in his seat all avoidy nonchalance. She runs home, questions swelling. 

Everyone's asleep, so she leaves a note on the fridge. It's been… more than thirty-four days since she last vanished for the night with a vague written excuse about slayerey business; they can cope. She's got an explanation to wait out. And, okay, she doesn't want to leave him alone. Not with… whatever it is. 

  
  


Strange, after so long, to be neither on the move nor waiting out the daylight. Thirty-four fucking days. Had meant to be back clean in under a week. Had wondered, at times, if it'd been thirty-four years. Had sorta got used to the idea that 'walking back to Buffy' was all there was, would ever be, an endless nightmare loop that was his own personal hell. Had even come to find a degree of comfort in it, in the action of doing the right thing from every angle, following her instructions yet keeping his influence safely out of her life. Had forgotten it would end eventually.   


Who the fuck is he kidding. He mostly just screamed and ran.

And then, there was her. Story of his bloody life.

Her, whom he was supposed to swagger back to, once upon a blind time, to shove his success in her face and his tongue back down her lovely throat. God, he makes himself sick.   


Her, whom he later comprehended the complete folly of asking for anything from, the cruelty of accepting anything from. Her who was surely much better off without a confusing and contradictory pest of a demon hounding after her. Dragging her back down. Abusing her and telling himself it was fucking helping.   


Her- Buffy. Buffy who came drifting along the road looking as lost as he'd ever seen her, as down as he'd ever seen her, as bloody lifeless as he'd- ...seen her lately. And things only got harder to sort out from there.

She hasn't been okay, that much is clear. He was right to worry about abandoning her. But he'd have been so wrong to stay, way things were going. Now… now he hasn't got a damn clue. Stupid soul's only made things more confusing.

Least he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut about it. Girl's got enough to deal with without his crap landing on her back too. Even if it did, for a few moments there. And a few more there. But he can do what the ponce never could; squash it down, sidestep the bloody moaning about his woeful past, focus on the path ahead instead of these…   


He shakes his head, looks down at the nearest candle again. Doesn’t do to go getting distracted. Where was he? Right. Path ahead. Path that's no longer followed by putting one foot in front of the other along the compass needle. Soul's meant to be like that; great big bang-flashing compass needle pointing to The Right Thing. Something about social expectations and fear of failing at such, he bluffed? God, what a load of bollocks. All of it. All he's gained is a fuckton of pure, absolute self-fucking-loathing. Would love nothing bloody more right now than another one of her scathing attacks. Except that was wrong too. Make that self-loathing, and a new understanding of such. Which is why it's so goddamn confusing;  _ I've been careful, Spike, _ she says (yeah, he caught up eventually, slow as he was).  _ You made it easier, Spike. Let me be kind, Spike. _ Feels like too much wishful thinking to believe that  _ this  _ time he could do something right when he had it all so arse-backwards before. That she could want him to. But god, the way she looks at him… he might have lost it somewhere along the way, but he's just remembered what ever gave him the bloody conceit to think he could be something more… something more. Felt the edge of it, again.   


_ What you did, for Dawn and me… _ Yeah. Might have made a bleeding hash of a lot of things, but there were some things there that truly shone and still do.

_ It's okay. We'll work it out.   
_

Anything sounds possible on her lips.   


Christ, he hopes she's back soon. 

  
  
  


Spike hasn't moved when she slips back into the crypt, except to press further into the corner of the couch, his usual space-claiming sprawl traded for the uncomfortable defensive huddle of an exhausted, wounded animal that's unused to feeling itself afraid. The walk - run - to Revello and back was good. Necessary. Reluctant as she'd been to leave so soon after finally finding him again (and without any answers), she'd needed the breather to clear her head. Things tend to get a bit spazzy up there, these days. Especially when he's involved and her clothes are on. And for all time she's spent waiting for him, missing him, wondering, somehow she'd entirely failed to prepare herself for his return. Oh, she had a bucketful of disconnected thoughts and wishes and regrets, but they didn't add up to much sense when upended over the head of a poor worn-out vampire she'd just carried home.   


He's back. He  _ came _ back. He still loves her. It's sunk in, with her jogging feet. Calming. She doesn't need to rush; he's always more patient with her struggling thoughts than she'd ever have believed possible before she started sharing them with him. But she did rush back, because he hadn't wanted to be left here alone, whether he admitted so or not. And because he looks like he's been dragged through hell backwards on a wet day, and she really wants to make him comfortable. And because as soon as she got outside and took a few deep breaths, it began to grow clearer and clearer in her mind that there is something very wrong with him.   


"Hey," she says gently as she closes the door, made shy after all of her blabbering.

"Hey," he echoes. And smiles, just a little; a little lift to his cheeks, a little loosening of the tension to his shoulders. Enough to show that despite everything, he still feels relieved to have her with him.   


She's smiling a little too.

She hadn't really expected him to stay put; either he's that much worse off than he's letting show, or he decided to follow her request to the letter, for some weird reason. Both, maybe. She puts blood in the microwave to defrost, then eyes him over. "We should-"  _ not go to bed- _ "move downstairs. So you can lie down before I clean that up." She nods at his grazed chest, wincing slightly. She's banking on the rest of him being more or less in one piece, given that his coat and jeans have made it through whatever slaughtered his shirt.   


He grimaces to himself but gives her a nod back. "Don't need cleaning, pet. Won't say lying on a real bed doesn't sound good, though."

"You'll get blood on the sheets," she points out.   


"Wouldn't be the first time," he mumbles. "But I'll put a shirt on."

Okay, so he's used to sleeping off a few grazes without paying them any heed. But she wants to fix them. Fix  _ something.  _ She huffs to herself and goes to move the slab from over the ladder. "What happened to the one you had on?" she asks lightly.   


"It got shredded," he says, in a tone that says he knows perfectly well she's prying sideways.

"By?"

"Demon."

Hmph. She drops it for now and goes to help him up. "I could carry you?"

He smiles properly then. "I know. But I can walk myself, now that I've lazed around for a bit." He still lets her pull him up before padding slowly over to the ladder and climbing down.   


She jumps the drop and skips around him to go and pull back the blankets, light candles, hoping she hasn't left any telltale signs of her aborted night here. Not that he would mind, just… it seems silly, now. And he might think she was just here for the ambience.   


He slides off his coat, moving like everything's stiff and tired, then sits down on the side of the bed and holds it out to her. "Could you hang that up?"   


She nearly says something stupid about not being a doorman, but kicks it down and takes the coat to hang up on one of the hooks by the dresser. Finds him a clean shirt, jeans; looks for socks before realising he doesn't have any. There's a missing pair of her panties in what would be a sock draw, and a silk scarf they once used in bed. She closes the draw on them softly and carries the clothes over to him. She wants to touch his face, hair, run her hands over him and kiss him tenderly. But she's done too much of the jumping him like a cat in heat with her claws ready to follow, and now it's all awkward to approach him differently. Oh god, she's gone  _ shy _ . It didn't matter before, when he was always daring her and she was trying to prove none of it meant anything.

Upstairs, the microwave starts beeping, so she puts the things down next to him. "I'll go get that."   


When she comes back with it, he's changed and lying on his side with his head braced against a hand, blinking heavily. She sits on the side of the bed and passes him the mug, and he stares into it blearily for a while before drinking it down.   


"There's more," she says, taking the mug back and resting a hand on his shoulder. "Don't fall asleep while I go get it."

"Won't," he says plainly.   


He has, when she returns all of half a minute later. She wakes him up enough to get him to drink it with his eyes shut, then sets the mug down on the bedside table and watches him crash straight out again.   


Shame comes crawling up her spine, watching him sleep in the exhausted, boneless way he's obviously needed to since long before running into her and all of her drama earlier. Shame, and a very full, slightly achy, slightly… contented feeling. She moves his hand off her leg carefully, then crawls into bed behind him to warm him up.

  
  
  


This time, the nightmare grabs him by the feet and tears its way right back into reality with him. Or into a change of scene. Can't tell, doesn't matter, only that the waves of blood lapping at his skin are still here, wrapping around him, slippery and way too fucking tangible, the sickening metallic tang of them on his tongue, claggy in his throat, the scent of Buffy hot in his nose, here in the bed where he's tried to claw his way to her heart, fingers like scalpels slicing open her chest and pulling back ribs to get to it at last; trying to escape run flee from the roaring horror of what he's done to a place where it wasn't done- but all that blood all too real and dragging him down to face it, to face her dead eyes somewhere inside the waves and the horribly sensual sound of her moan when he finally got his hand around that red wet fleshy thing and  _ squeezed _ \-   


She pops up, leaping to her feet a few yards away- leaping  _ back _ to her feet- and the grasping bloody tide drops him suddenly, crashing to the floor beside the bed-   


And she's growling something, annoyed, and all in one golden piece, and the slippery redness is just his fucking sheets, and he swipes at them with desperate hands and they finally fall away from his skin as the echoes of screams die out in the walls and it was- just that nightmare.   


His hand goes to his own chest, to the burning there, to the thing that flames the intensity of this nightmare and makes it only one, covering it, sheltering it from all the… all of it, rubbing at the pain of it in its dead jar.   


And fuck, he needs to cover this too, fast, excuse it away before she-

She freezes on the spot, freezes where she was about to crouch in front of him and already reaching; freezes with her eyes on his hand and a look of dawning, fiercely-denying horror in them.   


He freezes too, mid-word of whatever damning things he's been saying, praying everything will freeze long enough for him to grab control of the situation.   


But it's too late.   


Her hand retreats slowly, back into herself, and all of her becomes icy stiff, controlled, a power absolute towering over him. "What did you do, Spike?" she says, and her voice is a low, too-heavy order of command.

Can't lie to it. Doesn’t want to answer it. No hope of deflecting. He stops rubbing at his chest, folds his hands in around it, as though it's not too late to hide it from her hunter's eyes that have seen too much.   


"What," she repeats, biting out each word, "did - you - do?"

He drags in a breath, swallows. Mumbles, "Tried to fix it."

"How?" she shoots back instantly. When he doesn't respond in time, she takes a small step back, folding her own arms tight across her. "Angel used to do that," she accuses, jabbing a sharp glance of warning at his chest. "When he first came back."

It would be sodding Angel, wouldn't it, who's still fucking everything up from all those miles away.   


He needs to own this, before she completes her leap to the wrong conclusion. It's  _ his _ , all his, this tortured, torturous thing that  _ he _ fought for and won. Not a shameful secret. He tightens his arms over it, tightens hìs jaw, glares back at her. "Could say I did some soul-searching out there," he tells her.   


"No," she breathes, and the look of warning flees her face to be replaced by desperate wide-eyed denial. She presses her lips together, starts shaking her head. Steps backwards, almost stumbling away from him, back towards the ladder. Cheeks too white again and panicked animal eyes that go straight past his to track the motion of his feet as he moves to get up.

"Yes," he growls, scrambling onto his legs. "I fucking did." It's roaring back now, all of it, to answer the challenge of her disbelief. He points a finger at her, following her retreat, ready to slap her with the truth until she sees. "Didn’t want to believe me, did you, when I said I'd fucking changed? That it's not the sodding chip what's making me fight beside you? That I could be more than what you try to bloody make me?"

"Don't you fucking touch me," she hisses, serpent-like, when he gets closer. One sinuous step and she's put the ladder between them, her body coiling ready to spring into action behind it. The stake in her fist appears from nowhere, like always, but this time it's no idle threat or nasty reminder; everything about her screams business.   


It's enough to pull his feet up, slam a halt to his attempt to slap or shake or shout it into her. Despite himself, he feels his weight shift into a fighting stance in response, warily defensive. Slayer, vampire. Soul can't fucking change that.   


Bitterness twists through confusion.   


"Who the hell  _ are _ you?" she spits, venom on her tongue. Her eyes watch everything except his, calculating, recalculating. Then her stake  _ shivers _ , the faintest of tremors shaking the hand holding it, and he thinks maybe she's lost her bloody marbles- then he gets it.

Goddamned, deluded, manipulative, bullshitting, cursed fucking  _ Angel.  _ lus. He sighs out his breath, dropping his ready stance with it to stand passively. Makes his voice gentle. "I'm still me, luv. Not going to hurt you." Kinda the whole fucking point, and why  _ getting  _ a soul should suddenly make him dangerous is beyond him, except… some experiences just cut that extra deep. Doesn’t matter how unfair they are. He sighs again and sinks down to crouch on his haunches on the floor, runs a hand through his hair. "Hush, kitten." God, he's tired. "Still the same fuck-up of a vampire, luv. Just with something new to adjust to."   


Her eyes touch his at last, and she slowly lowers her stake to her waist. Listening, with judgement held quivering.   


"Actually, you want dead honesty?" he continues softly. "Don't think I was sure what or where the hell I was until tonight." He snorts. "Can see how the great broody one lost his self. But I had to get back here, yeah? And you've rather a way about you of… reminding me what I am." Some things - he's glad to grab hold of right now - remain exactly the same. Like the way she can try to stare him down with her cut-gemstone eyes promising death and his arms ache to hold her to him instead. Knows who he is, around her. Even when she disagrees.

She licks her lips, making a decision, then tucks her stake away again. "Spike, with- with a soul?" she confirms, her tone restrained and cautious.   


"Yeah." He thinks about adding,  _ but call me Spi if you want,  _ but this isn't the time to overload her. Give her space to process. God, he didn’t… "Didn’t mean for you to find out like this," he says gently.   


Her eyes skim back to the bed, and tighten at the corners in a brief wince. God knows what he screamed about before throwing her across the room for trying to wake him from it.   


When she looks at him again her face is a fraction softer … until it ices right back over again. "How  _ did _ you mean to tell me, Spike?" she asks tightly. "What, you thought you'd come back acting exactly the same just so you could prove how insignificant souls are when you finally got bored and told me? Then, let me guess, then you thought you'd stick your dick in my soul-sucking vagina and ejaculate the nuisance thing out, like he did?" Venom's building back in her tone, dribbling from the long-festering wounds he's just stabbed a lance into. "All fun and games with Buffy, huh?" She  _ sneers _ at him, a flash of not-quite-a-fang under her curled lip. "How's that plan working out for you so far?" She drops the sneer, looks inward for a moment. "Or was this  _ not _ the plan at all; did you piss off the wrong witch out there and only come running back here for a bit of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am to save you from your latest bad idea?"   


"I didn't-" He sighs, reconsiders. "It's permanent, slayer. Not a curse to be broken the first time I gazed upon your bitchy face again." Shakes his head, shaking off the vitriol of old hurts splattering from her. "Permanent, intentional, fucking mine fair and square and for keeps. Nothing to bloody do with you. Didn’t want to  _ tell _ you because you look like you've got enough on your bloody plate already." What's he missed, dammit? Right. "Came back because I pr-" He pauses, grabs the underlying truth. "Because I love you, okay? Supposed to or otherwise. Hoped I could help you out a bit better now. Figured you could tell me what the hell should be done with me instead if not." He shrugs. "There you have it." Best he can do, right now.   


He watches her ire slowly fade into the shock and confusion driving it, then she slinks cautiously around from the ladder. "Why, Spike?" she whispers, crouching down to his level, though still just out of reach. Without the armour of that spitting anger surrounding her it's hard to resist reaching for her. Christ, he's made everything hard.   


"Why'd I do it?" he asks softly, because there's a lot of potential whys on the table right now.   


She nods, eyes on his chest again. Worried, guilty, ashamed… he's starting to feel like all he's done is smack her from one painful emotion to another from the moment she drifted into his path tonight.   


He sighs. Feels like all he's good at. "Lot of reasons. Lots and lots of tiny reasons…" Can't figure out if it would help or not to tell that actually it had everything to do with her, in a way; that every tiny reason orbits the same sun. So he tiptoes. "Wasn’t happy with what I was. Stuck between sides. Thought I'd take charge and do something about it." He smiles at her tentatively. "Got this idea in my head that I could choose to be something… more than I was. Something worthwhile." Sounds ridiculous now. He looks at the floor, realises dully that his feet are starting to regain some feeling. Brilliant.   


Hears her take a slow, deep breath, in and out, and matches her by habit.   


"Come back to the bed," she says quietly. "You still look awful. At least now I know why… Sorry, I…" He lifts his eyes to see that floundering look on her face. "Can we just go and sit down and talk this through slowly? If- if you want to talk about it. Sorry, it's kinda… a lot."   


"Yeah," he agrees. Needs to explain this better than he has, but more… he  _ wants  _ to tell her about it, suddenly. Wants to admit out loud that it's all so bloody confusing, and frightening, and horrifying, and… hopeful, maybe. "That, um, yeah." He huffs a weary chuckle at himself and gets back up.

The silky red sheets have to go. He takes an edge of the one that's mostly on the floor already and starts pulling it the rest of the way off, squirming in his gut at the sensation under his fingers. Bloody ridiculous, but he can't stop it.

"Here," Buffy murmurs, and tugs it out of his unresisting hand, scooping it all in and bundling it up in her arms, then stripping the matching bottom sheet off the bed and scrunching it into the same small ball. Like magic. Like a fearless goddess of protection overruling nightmares with an effortless swish of her hands. "Is the comforter okay?" she asks quietly.   


A twinge of embarrassment goes through him, but there's nothing in her waiting face beyond understanding and enquiry. Yeah. She's not too hot about some things these days; falling earth, muddy grass on her fingers. He nods. "Thanks."

She smiles one of those subtle little smiles back and takes the sheets away, off towards the tunnel access somewhere. By the time she returns with a second comforter he's smoothed out the one on the bed and sat down against the headboard on one side, all thumb-twiddly and placeless. She spreads the second comforter out to cover him from the waist down, then sits herself on top of it on the far edge of the bed. Closer than he'd expected, all things considered.   


"It's gone all awkward," she pouts after a minute, wrinkling up her nose.   


He chuckles softly. "Yep." Wriggles down until he's lying on his back, staring up at the wonderfully familiar pattern of rocks in the ceiling. Would rather turn sideways and stare at her, but it feels like a good idea to give her space if he's not going to spook her off any further than he already has. God, it's good to lie on a bed. "Ask your questions, pet," he murmurs. "Clear the air, 'fore I fall asleep and wake up screaming and we're back where we started."

"There's nothing else, is there?" she asks, a little anxiously. "You're not going to like, turn into a… a bat or something?"

"A  _ bat… _ ?" That does it; he rolls over to face her. "Chip's still fine and dandy, if that's what you mean-"

"I didn't," she says quickly, glancing down at him. Then shrugs a shoulder. "Hadn't really got that far."

Huh. He stows that one away to examine later. "No bats," he fake-growls in admonishment. "Leave that one for He of the Pretentious Capes." Wasn’t really what she was asking, though. "Just the…" It doesn’t fit under _just._ It's a thing too big - a change too big - an _unknown_ under his skin too big to ever be described as 'just the soul' _._ _Is_ he still himself? If she doesn't know how can he possibly pretend to do so? But she did know him, until she found out about it and logiced that he _had_ to be someone else. Or did she only recognise his skin? Everything had already been off between them before she found out- No. Not everything. Not the parts that mattered most. "There's nothing else," he amends. Just this whomping big thing between them in the bed, changing everything, making him a sodding stranger that she's got all her defences thrown up to. He was never really coming back to her, was he? Fuck.   


She's quiet for a long time, watching the shape of him underneath the blankets, secret thoughts swirling in her half-lidded eyes. Thinks about tugging her down to him, tumbling her about with him, stripping her out of those clothes and  _ proving _ he's still what she needs. But he's not sure anymore that he is. Hell, he's not sure he ever  _ was. _ And dragging her into his arms just to lose his shit in the crying and screaming again would  _ not  _ be conducive to reassuring her.   


"I don't know," she mutters to herself finally. He couldn't have put it better. She shakes her head, shoves blankets around and slides in between them, lying down to face him. There's still an acre of bed between them, but her warm scent fills it, changes it. "How?" she asks softly.   


So he tells her. 

  
  
  


Whimpering cuts through dreams, calling her from them to the borders of wakefulness. She pets the source of it automatically, slow strokes of her sleepily heavy hand, mumbling something soothing until the whimpers fade back into slumber. She's going the other way now though, clarity slowly pulling together until she blinks open her eyes.   


The crypt is darker, candles long since burnt down to extinguish in waxy puddles. Cold grey light falls weakly through the ladder hole at the far end of the room; pre-dawn, or the morning of another wet day. She listens, but can't pick out any sound of rain. Then listens further, to the earth-muted air, to the hazy grey light, to the distant echoes of the everything of last night. To the sleeping breath beside her. She turns her eyes to him finally, to tracing the familiar curve of his lashes, the fall of shadow on his cheek, the plush pout of his bottom lip.   


Feelings flow easier, unobstructed by the clutter of full alertness, by the jarring detritus that accumulates each day. The rationalisations and counter-arguments, disjointed snatches of thoughts, exhausting tangles of threads all knotted together; all flotsam drifting faintly about at the edges while she floats in the deep.   


She loves him. It's so far beyond sense that it simply is; she loves him. More; she  _ wants  _ to love him. Wants to love them all. Wants to let go of everything they've done, everything she's done and failed to do, everything she  _ should  _ feel, and just let herself feel this. She’s so sick of being not dead. Sick of clinging to the edge of a grave, stuck between falling and climbing, too guilty about what it would mean to let go and fall, too ashamed of sometimes wanting to do so to lift herself up; stuck in a limbo that had gradually become passive endurance. She'd still been using him, even while he was gone, her self-destructive habits spinning his absence too into so many more excuses. Enough. Screw the guilt and shame. If she’s going to be other than dead, she damn well wants to  _ live. _   


So what if there's still dirt in her lungs, or necrotic nerve endings in her chest. That's not all she is. Or will be. If Spike can look at her and see something - some _ one _ \- worth fighting for when she can't even bear to look at herself (if he can look at himself and set out to do the impossible to become more than what he sees there) then she can find it too. Find it, and nurture it, like she has her toxicity. Get to know it. And get to know him, properly; all those tiny, almost insignificant surface details she punched right past and is wildly curious about now that she's ready to love the important parts underneath. And the big, massive, more than slightly scary new thing, things, that he barely knows yet either, but they can puzzle through together. She's good at dealing with big scary things.

Her friends aren't going to understand.  _ He's  _ not going to understand, at first. But it doesn't matter. They'll still- they  _ still _ love her now, despite the way she's been. So they don't need to. She just needs to let them know that  _ she's _ beginning to, and that she still loves them. That she wants to live with them more than she's ready to die for them. That maybe how you come back doesn't have to be how you stay.

The weak grey light is growing slowly, warming; pre-dawn, not rain. Or a break in the clouds. Either way, she'll have to get up soon, think about work and a trip to the butcher's, what Dawn’s having for dinner and whether Willow’s going to be home tonight to babysit or if she needs to bring Spike there. Flotsam, ready to obscure the purity of this feeling. So she tucks it up inside her, hidden away safe, safe to grow where nothing can touch it until it's ready to come out again; something to fill the emptiness she's been flooding with pain. 

  
  


He wakes up- to  _ quiet _ . To the gentle rhythm of her heartbeat and the soft sound of her breath. To the scent of her sleepy skin and the warmth of her beside him. Her gold-green eyes are watching him from barely six inches away, and there's a smile glowing in them, a completely new one, a mysterious little gleam like she has some wonderful secret she's hugging to herself. There's whispers sliding back into his ears already, memories trying to surface, the reminder that he doesn't deserve to and shouldn't be here with her… but they can fuck off. He looks at that inscrutable little smile and  _ knows  _ that somehow, eventually, everything is going to be all right. 

  
  



End file.
